Steemit's First 'Fest' Reveals the Power of Blockchain Community

 When it comes to evaluating the strength of a blockchain (after you  put aside technical discussions), what matters more, eventually, is the  ecosystem that forms around a blockchain, the community that develops to  support it. In the public blockchain segment, bitcoin is known to have the  strongest, if not the most expansive blockchain ecosystem. Ethereum is  easily second in line, with over 300 distributed applications and an increasing number of startup companies opting to use its infrastructure. If you continue this ranking using community and ecosystem as units of measure, Steem (via its flagship social site Steemit) is the best contender for the third-largest, blockchain ecosystem.

For background, Steem is the blockchain platform that powers Steemit,  an incentivized social media publishing application. (Steemit is like  social media sites you're familiar with, except that users earn real  financial rewards for posting, participating and voting). Actually, the Steem blockchain has already (automatically) dispensed  $4m since its launch in March 2016 to thousands of its early adopters,  and has caught the attention of the market due to the meteoric rise of  its cryptocurrency, then subsequent fall back to initial levels. For the sake of analogy, if Facebook was re-incarnated today, using  Steem's philosophy, we would all get compensated for giving them our  attention, which they have centrally and monopolistically monetized.