History
On July, 4th, 2016, Steemit, Inc. officially launched Steemit, a social media with virtual currency rewards that runs over the Steem blockchain. On July 1, 2016 Steemit announced on their website that they were hacked. The attack, according to them, has compromised about 260 accounts. A little less than US$ 85,000 worth of Steem Dollars and Steem are reported to have been taken by the attackers.
Concept
User accounts can upvote posts and comments similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, and the authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency token named Steem and US dollar-pegged tokens called Steem Dollars. People are also rewarded for curating (discovering) popular content. Curating involves voting comments and post submissions. Vote strength and curation rewards are influenced by the amount of Steem Power held by the voter.[5][7]
Steemit includes third-party applications, such as d.tube, a decentralized video platform based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. D.tube is similar to YouTube, but without advertisements, instead uses the built-in Steem currency which gets awarded by users upvoting videos
Monetary system
Steem is based on the Smart Media Tokens (SMT) protocol, developed by Steemit. As of December 2017, CoinMarketCap.com listed Steem with a $475 million market capitalization, and ranked Steem tokens 32nd of 1,358 cryptocurrencies. User actions, such as upvoting facilitates Steem's Proof-of-Brain algorithm, which also factors in the Steem Power a user holds, to provide incentives for content creators and the community by transferring small amounts of the Steem token currency.[9]
Steem began with a highly inflationary supply model, doubling roughly every year.[5] However, due to community demand, on December 6, 2016 the inflation rate of Steem was changed to 9.5% per year, reducing by 0.5% per year
Usage and media coverage
As of Nov 2017, there are more than 450,000 Steem accounts.[11] After an initial public beta for which no payments were made, the hard fork on July 4, 2016, saw $1,300,000 of Steem and Steem Dollars paid out to Steemit users.[12] According to company reports, since October 2017, $30 million were paid out to over 50,000 users.[13]
The exchange rate of Steem compared to Bitcoin rose continuously during July 2016, peaking at a price of over 4 US dollars.[5] July 20, 2016, Steem had a first notable peak of market capitalization with about 405 million US dollars.[14] As of December 16, 2017, its market cap is 525 million US dollars.