If there is one dApp that route the vote buying/selling culture in the Steem blockchain, it has to be Smartsteem. Aside from regularizing the scheme, they also initiated the creation of "Whitelist" to make sure that the additional rewards for vote buying will be delivered to the ones that deserved it.
The regularized vote selling-buying culture in Steem has been around for more than a year now and it doesn't seem to stop any moment soon. Obviously their is a need for some users and many would want to use it to promote their contents that they deemed valuable to the Steem users. I'm not against it although we can't avoid the obvious that it will be abused at some point. But, I'd rather look into the positive side of it instead of the negative.
For today, I'd like to talk about a service / dApp that is making an effort to regularize the vote selling-buying industry (if I may call it that way) - Smartsteem!
Smartsteem was launched in late 2017 as an investment and promotion-service for the Steem blockchain. Since the very beginning the aim of Smartsteem was to not only make it easier for users and investors of all sizes to grow their stake on STEEM, but do so in a sustainable ethical manner.
It was founded by 
For this dApp review, let me start by showing the interface & basic services that Smartsteem is currently offering for us:
Note: The log-in part will be done using Steemconnect which is claimed to be a secured way of signing-in outside the Steemit.com website.
DASHBOARD
After completing the log-in part, you will be directed to the Dashboard where you will find all basic information about your Smartsteem account. First thing to check is whether you are “Blacklisted” or if not then you can proceed on the rest which are: earnings, investment, revenues for the previous days. Essentially, it's the page where you can quickly check the current activities of your account.
PROMOTE
For the ones that intended to purchase an upvote you will find 2 options:
- Smartmarket - is a vote buying service where the upvotes will come from other Steem accounts who sell their upvotes. It has a fixed ROI of 10% which is acceptable. It's also suggested to activate this service after the 15 min mark of your post to maximize the author rewards that you will get from the bought upvotes.
- Smartsteem - this is a bid upvote bot where anyone can set a certain amount of steem or sbd to be sent to
. You have to take note that this service has what they call as “Dynamic ROI of around 15% to -10%”. Since this is a promotional service, there is no guarantee of earnings so, use it wisely.
For both services, there are set of rule or guidelines for you to follow, one of which is that the contents that are deemed to spam or plagiarism of some sort are not allowed by Smartsteem so, use it responsibly.
INVEST
If you’re account holds Steem Power and you don’t have spare time to curate for contents, you have 2 options on how to earn steem tokens through your SP.
- Vote Selling - with this feature, you are essentially providing the the permission to Smartsteem to curate in behalf of your account. It will instruct your steem account to upvote based on the amount of steem/sbd that a “vote buyer” sent to Smartmarket (mentioned at the Promote topic of this post). The good thing about this is that you are earning liquid tokens and curation reward as well.
- Steem Power Delegation - with this feature, you are essentially lending your SP to the
BALANCE
Here is the fun part, this page will actually show your earnings (which was showed earlier at the Dashboard) but, with the added function to withdraw your earnings. This is a manual operation that you can perform anytime you earn something. It also added the option to “encrypt” the memo whenever
SETTINGS
In this page, you are able to automate the manual operations that was mentioned on the topics: Payout, Vote Selling, Delegation, & Promotion.
- Payout - in this page, you will be able to set the delivery of your earned tokens to your steem account automatically. You are also able to set the duration or interval for each payout received which could be everyday or every 2 days or even every week.
- Vote Selling - Before you Steem account can perform the vote selling, you are initially required to authorized Smartsteem through this page. In addition, you can set the Voting power limit to a level that feel comfortable with. Some of us would like to maintain a VP not lower than a certain percentage, this page is where you can set it. The best part is that you can also set to restrict your upvote so that Smartsteem will only sell it to the steem users that are in the Smartsteem whitelist.
- Delegation - it is the page where delegation was simplified for investors who are clearly not familiar at how delegation works. The available or active SP is also shown for the investor’s convenience.
- Promotion - this page is provided for vote buyers who wish to set the types of votes to receive. There 4 available options which are self explanatory: All Available Votes, More Smaller Votes, Normal Votes, & Less Smaller Votes.
TOOLS
In this page, they have added a new feature that is similar to what you can find to your Steemit Wallet, these are: Total SP, Total Steem, & Total SBD. Basically, the Smartsteem website is a one-stop shop which actually show almost everything regarding your activities to their platform.
SMART MONSTERS
Another cool feature that was added to the Smartsteem services is the Smart monsters in which you can purchase your Steem Monsters booster pack & starter sets. They also offer a 1% Loyalty Reward if you purchase using their SmartMonsters which is considerably a good deal.
REFERRAL
Lastly, if you feel affiliated to Smartsteem, why don’t you share it to your friends and invite them to buy the upvotes using the Smartsteem platform. With a successful invite and for every purchase votes by your referee you will be able to earn 0.5% of the profit.
And it’s easy to set-up, the referral code is already prepared as you enter this page, below is my referral code.