Steemit is a blogging and social networking website on top of the Steem blockchain database. The Steem blockchain produces Steem and Steem Dollars which are tradeable tokens users obtain for posting, discovering, and commenting on interesting content.
Steemit, Inc is a privately held company based in New York City and headquartered in Virginia. The company was founded by Ned Scott and Dan Larimer, creator of BitShares, and EOS.
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. On March 15, 2017 Dan resigned as a head of technology and a marketing team was announced with Mitchel Loureiro (
The Steemit concept was described in the companies white paper, released in March 2016. The general concept is similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, but the text content is saved in a blockchain. Using a blockchain enables rewarding comments and posts with secure tokens of value. Images can be uploaded and hosted on Steemit. Other multimedia content must be embedded from other web hosts. For formatting, there is a WYSIWYG editor. Users can also opt to use Markdown formatting with HTML elements.
User accounts can upvote posts and comments, 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.
Steemit has a reputation system, where new accounts start with a reputation of 25. An account's received votes can influence its reputation up and down, incentivizing online etiquette and interaction with the community.
The Steem blockchain has two tokens: STEEM and Steem Dollars. There is also a vested or stored interest known as Steem Power. Steem Power is strictly for internal use in the Steem community, while the tokens are used for stored value and trading.
Steem
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.
Steem began with a highly inflationary supply model, doubling roughly every year.[4] 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.