Welcome to the first edition of @BTUniverse Spotlight, a series focused on highlighting some of the amazing things happening both inside and outside the cryptosphere. In this episode we'd like to discuss some of the massive improvements going on behind the scenes with Steem and why we still expect 2018 to be an amazing year for the Steem community in general!
Before we get into the recent updates regarding the massive development going on behind the scenes, we would first like to provide a brief background of Steem to our readers as it is a fascinating story that deserves to be told.
The History of Steem and Steemit
Before Steem existed as code, it existed simply as an idea for a more equitable social network. Steem started as the brainchild of founders Daniel Larimer 
Steem was designed to be a blockchain that could handle an incredible number of transactions per second in order to facilitate content publishing in a decentralized manner.
Steem would provide the technological backbone in which to host the Steemit.com platform. Steemit was thought to target the problem of value transference through social media. It would be a social network that rewarded solid content producers, amazing writers, and basically anyone who had something of value to contribute to the community.
Although the original idea was developed in January of 2016, it took a few months to put it all together. A lot of hard work, effort and love was put into the project by Dan and Ned.
It didn't take too long until all that hard work paid off!
On March 24 2016, the Steem blockchain was launched and mining began at 17:00:00 GMT.
It is interesting to note that the Steem blockchain was pre-coded to give out its first rewards on the 4th of July, 2016. We can only guess the message that existed behind this intelligent programming. Perhaps it was a message of freedom or independence?
When we look at a few metrics behind Steemit.com it is actually an incredible success considering its popularity throughout the world.
In fact, according to recent Alexa.com data, Steemit.com is globally ranked 1,788 and currently remains the 1,635th most popular website in the United States!
Digging into the metrics a bit deeper, there are a few more interesting things to learn about Steemit.
For example, its user base exists all over the world but the majority of its user-base comes from the United States, the U.K., Germany, Russia and India.
Beyond the geographical location of users, the demographics of Steemit.com are also quite interesting. According to data obtained from Alexa.com, Steemit.com users tend to be intellectuals with an impressive number of users holding one or more degrees from a university.
Beyond the demographics of the site, another interesting factor to look at is engagement. Steemians spend a lot of time creating content and supporting members of the community!
Steem is an entire ecosystem with Steemit.com being a large part of it but not the only way to access the blockchain. Other interfaces exist like SteemStem.com and Busy.org which can be used in a similar manner.
Steem Updates
Now that we've managed to discuss the history of Steem and Steemit.com and go over some very interesting statistics regarding the state of the ecosystem, let's turn attention to what is happening to develop the Steem project in 2018.
In a recent article entitled 'Applications Team Update: Hivemind/Communities, Sign-ups, Developer Tools, and Condenser (steemit.com)' some welcomed news was received that we feel deserves extra merit and attention.
This article was published just three days ago at the time of writing this article so it's hot off the press although it's not the first news the community has received from the development team this month. They are extremely active which holds a lot of promise for the future!
[Image Provided by SteemitBlog]
In this most recent update, the developers talked about some of the most recent advancements with Hivemind and Steem Communities, Sign-Ups and their Condenser tool.
One of the biggest and most exciting announcements in our opinion was the fact that Hive 1.0 is now live!
We are excited to announce that hive 1.0 has been completed and is live in production! Condenser has been updated to start using the hive APIs and is currently undergoing testing against hive’s condenser_api implementation. The current focus is on compatibility and stability.
A lot of Steemians have complained this year about how slow development has been taking place with the blockchain but the fact of the matter is that developing and improving upon commercial grade blockchains is tricky business! We would like to commend the team for making such outstanding progress in moving the ecosystem forward.
Development has taken much longer than originally planned because we made the decision early on that we should build communities for Steem and not exclusively steemit.com. In other words, we wanted to build a Communities layer that every Steem developer could leverage.
Based on our understanding of this announcement, what we are looking at is a massive change from simply allowing community tokens to exist within the Steemit.com platform.
Instead, they have now broadened their focus and developers will be able to issue SMTs (community tokens) across all applications built upon Steem. What this means is that it will be much easier to add additional use cases and bring in new developers that are incentivized to build on top of Steem.
The bottom line is that there are some amazing developments taking place and good things take time! Let's support developers in their efforts to expand the ecosystem and do what we can as good Steemians to push that effort along.
We hoped you enjoyed this article and thanks for visiting BuildTeam Universe!
In-text Citation Sources:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog
Join our Discord chat
Get support and connect with us and other BuildTeam fans!
Missed the BuildTeam announcement? Here are all the juicy details.
Visit our flashy new website BuildTeam.io!
Vote Buildteameos for top 21 EOS Block Producer! Learn how with our EOS-Voter guide here.
Set 
as your Steem witness proxy today and contribute to building a better tomorrow!
Want an easier way? Use our SteemConnect proxy link!
This is a 
