Hello steemians,

Everyone has been talking about Smart Media Tokens in the last couple of months, therefore in this post I wanted to analyse the impact that the release of SMT's will have on Steem Holders (us). Everything said here is my personal opinion not financial advice.

Without a further ado lets get to the good stuff:

WHAT ARE SMART MEDIA TOKENS?

Currently Steemit Inc is creating a protocol that will enable anyone to create their own token for under 1 $ and implement it to their blog, forum...

Real example:

Bob has a blog and he enthusiastically writes an article every single day, however, he can't make enough money through advertising so he launches his own SMT, his readers buy some tokens and with the funds raised he is able to keep writing, additionally his own readers can reward him in form of the token he created.
His blog would now have all the characteristics that Steemit now has making it much more entertaining for the reader to interact and support the blogger while also being rewarded by commenting.

WHY WILL SMART MEDIA TOKENS INCREASE THE PRICE OF STEEM?

In order to understand how SMT's will increase Steem's price we first need to understand two key points:

1 Every action in the Steem Blockchain requires bandwidth

That's right, whenever you comment, post, upvote, follow, unfollow, silent, transfer, power up, power down or use the internal market to exchange SBD-STEEM you are consuming bandwidth (space of information inside a block which is later stored in a record).

2 The amount of bandwidth you have depends on the amount of Steem Power you hold

This means that the platform rewards holders and good authors by giving the ability to do everything more times.

What does this have to do with SMT's?

SMT's are tokens, they don't have their own blockchain unlike hard-forks (Golos for example) this means that in order for an SMT to work the owner needs to hold Steem Power so that he/she is able to store the data from his/her blog in the Steem Blockchain.
Therefore in order to have your own SMT you also need to invest in Steem accordingly so that you have enough bandwidth for all the transactions that will happen with your token.

THE INCREASE IN STEEM'S PRICE

In the example we put before Bob would have to allocate part of the funds he raised in order to buy Steem therefore increasing its price.

CONCLUSION

When SMT's are released (hopefully in 2018, can't wait for it ;D) every new token created will increase the demand for Steem and its price meaning that in the long-term Steem Power holders will earn huge profits. SMT's are a 3.0 blockchain technology that is ground-breaking and I'm sure that in the future as @ned said we will see over 100,000 entrepreneurs creating their own token.

Feel free to leave your thoughts down below, I'd love to hear them.

Image credit: @voronoi

Cheers,
@lrd