As I was doing my curation today, I noticed this buzz from @dbuzz:
So, their onboarding service is currently offline because they don't have enough RCs, and I assume they have started to run out of account creation tokens too.
We don't have recent daily Hive stats from @arcange, but from the last ones we have back from the end of January, DBuzz was either the first or second onboarder, either on top or below INLEO. I don't know what the retention rate is for each of them, but right now, we are talking about the first step, bringing someone over. And if you don't have account creation tokens (claimable with RCs), you can't create "free" accounts on Hive.
The two projects, INLEO and DBuzz have different strategies for getting enough account creation tokens.
INLEO offers tiered delegation rewards but for HP, not for RCs, which also allows them to dispense votes and the delegators lose the curation rewards associated with the delegated HP, so compensation is in order.
DBuzz needs and politely asks for some RC delegations, which for most people are in excess anyway.
Here's the situation with their RCs right now (the orange progress bar, the number is what I delegated to them):
Note that the RC level is normally quite low when you claim account creation tokens. It happens to me too. But if they also have a low number of account creation tokens, that disrupts the free onboarding process. And I assume they do, otherwise they wouldn't have put their service on halt.
They may also have constraints if they need their own RCs to delegate to newcomers for a better experience. I see they have delegated RCs to over 1,000 accounts.
Of course, ideally, as they grow and onboard more people they should make sure they have the necessary RCs for everything they need. But sometimes bottlenecks appear and it would be a shame to have another onboarding bottleneck on Hive these days, especially as they showed they can bring in enough people and probably more with the bull market excitement.