Investigating the Top 50 Cryptocurrencies, Part 27/50: Steem

Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform with a diverse set of front-ends and one of the largest communities in blockchain.

I knew that I would eventually get to write the post about steem! Steem is the reason that I am so involved in the blockchain space. I think a lot of us have developed a love for blockchain thanks to Steemit and all of the information here.

It’s a robust blockchain with 3-second no-fee transactions. That is leagues ahead of most blockchains, even the ones towards the top of the chart.

Keep reading for a deep dive on the steem blockchain.

About This Series + Disclaimer

This post is part of a new series where I investigate each of the top 50 coins by marketcap (based on coinmarketcap.com's rankings on October 11, 2017). My goal is to help steem’s userbase become the most knowledgable blockchain community in the world.

Disclaimer: I am not an investment expert and will not be providing investment advice. I will teach you about the top 50 coins, and you can do what you want with that info.

What is Steem

Steem is a blockchain that enables social features and distributes rewards to content with a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) system called Steem Power (SP). As you know, the amount of SP that you have determines how strong your votes are.

SP used to give you more voting power in an exponential fashion, so that the disparity between whales and minnows was much more extreme. Hard Fork 19 switched it to the current linear rewards curve.

Users who post on steem earn rewards for each post they make based on who votes for it. Posts pay out after seven days with most of the money going to the post’s creator, and a small slice going out to the first people who voted for it.

Witnesses on Steem

People can vote for witnesses on steem with their SP. Each member gets 30 witness votes to allocate as they want. The more SP you have, the more powerful your witness votes are.

Witnesses are like miners in that they mine blocks. Every minute the top 20 witnesses mine one block, and then one additional person mines a block with the likelihood being directly proportional to the value of the votes they have received.

It’s possible to delegate your witness vote power to another user if you don’t want to think about it yourself. This is recommended for most new users.

The Steem Community

Steem’s community is one of the biggest communities in the entire blockchain space. There are more than 25,000 daily active users on steemit.com. That’s enough to have steemit holding steady above rank 2,200 on the Alexa global ranking.

Other Steem Front-Ends

The cool thing about Steem is how many different ways you can access it. Steemit is the most popular one by far right now, but there are many other valid options.

busy.org is one of the best ones. Every 12 hours you can tag your busy post with the “Busy” tag to earn a vote from their votebot, which is a nice bonus. Mostly it’s a great interface and has some nice bonuses over Steemit like the prominent Voting Power meter.

zappl.io is a Twitter clone built on the steem blockchain. It’s a cool idea and a good way for new users to maybe earn some extra rewards. Be careful and use a spare account only, because there are reports that Zappl’s security is not as good as it could be.

chainbb.org is a forum interface that reads the same posts as Steemit. There are subforums and the most recently commented posts are “bumped” to the top.

This is just the beginning. Anybody can build a new front-end that writes and reads data from the steem blockchain.

SMT Tokens

Steemit Inc announced in September 2017 that it would be launching Smart Media Tokens (SMTs). SMTs are cryptocurrency tokens issued upon the steem network in the same way that ERC-20 tokens are issued upon the ethereum network.

You can build a new social media platform that acts just any steem-powered site does, but has its own unique token. For example, the New York Times could issue a token that is rewarded to commenters based on upvotes. Reddit could implement a token. Theoretically everybody on the internet could start using tokens to reward posts within their ecosystems.

SMTs could lead to a bright future for steem when they are launched in 2018.

Token Distribution

Steem’s tokens were initially launched via a pre-mine and then the reward system kicked off with its first distribution happening in June 2016. The early days of steem were lucrative with a high token price (at its highest point, above $4), and not a lot of users to compete for rewards.

Steem tokens are issued at a steady and slowly declining rate. The inflation rate is high initially (around 9%) and reduces to a permanent floor of 1%. Half of the tokens go to top witnesses and the other half go to post & curation rewards.

The Steem Team

Here are a few key members of the steemit inc. team:

Ned Scott, CEO

_{source: LinkedIn}

Ned worked as a financial analyst at Gellert Global Group from May 2013 to February 2016. Around that time he founded Steem. His co-founder at the time was Dan Larimer but Dan departed steemit inc in early 2017 so he’s not on the team today.

Andrew Levine, Community Liason

Andrew was brought on to improve relations between the community and the staff of steemit in April 2017. He’s also responsible for securing media coverage for steem/steemit and bringing digital influencers onto the platform. Prior to steem he founded and worked at GiverHub.com in NYC.

Market History

Steem’s price tanked after some very early highs. It experienced a second moon phase in June 2017, but has been slowly trending downwards ever since. It sits around $0.90 as of now.

I think that steem is a smart long-term investment. The introduction of the SMT and the automated signups of Hard Fork 20 are both going to create upwards pressure on the price, IMO. Of course there is no way to know for sure.

Final Thoughts

I can’t wait to watch the steem community and token grow over the next few years. This is my favorite blockchain in the whole world and the future is looking bright.

Hard Fork 20 will be a big thing because it will make signups instant. Right now every signup confers a bit of Steem Power and therefore has to be manually approved. With hard fork 20, it will be possible for new users to get a little steem bandwidth without being allocated real steem power. This allows for instant signups.

Overall there’s a lot to look forward to. I think steem will reach $10 one day, I really do.

What do you think of Steem?