In the digital currency world, people love to talk about the “killer app,” a use for the technology that would bring it truly mainstream and compel the people who are dubious about Bitcoin to buy in. Many are still waiting for it, and say bitcoin needs it to succeed in the long run. Ned Scott believes he’s got it.
Scott is the cofounder and CEO of Steemit, a social network that runs on a new cryptocurrency called steem. Scott, a former analyst at food-industry private equity firm Gellert Group, and Dan Larimer, founder of BitShares, launched the network and the currency in April. Since that time, its market cap has ballooned from $2,000 to $300 million. The platform is very young, and has its problems, but it shows impressive potential.
Steemit works like Reddit, which Scott cites as an overt influence but says he hasn’t used. Steemit users publish a blog post—it could be any length, any topic at all—and other users can “upvote” it. The twist: Every upvote represents a small amount of steem power. Think of steem power as a representation of influence, because the more you have, the more power your upvote has to move someone else’s post up when you upvote it. Steem power can be converted to steem dollars, which at the moment trade for about $3.25 USD each.
That’s tiny, sure, but more steem is created from more activity on Steemit, and the $300 million market cap of steem is enough to rank it No. 3 among all cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap, behind only bitcoin and ether, the currency of the Ethereum network.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steem-steemit-bitcoin-reddit-cryptocurrency-000000501.html