What is the Steem blockchain and what are we doing?

wherein (69)in #asch • 4 years ago (edited)

In a nutshell, Steem is a text base blockchain database that supports community building and social interaction and also rewarding users with cryptocurrency. The blockchain has been continuously paying out to its contributor, author, community worker and also developer on their contribution transparently.

After 4 years running in the STEEM ecosystem. Steem has 1.4 million users in more than 60 countries and regions, covering more than 60 decentralized apps, more than 500 tools and websites, and more than 4,000 active users by actively authoring.

For 4000 daily postings are extremely low compare to what we’ve seen in the internet, but Steem's official operator, Steemit Inc, has only less than 7 employees, and most of them are developers.

Steem is an excellent example of self regulated community. How does that happened?

If you relate Steem as an economic organization, its most valuable is the design of its economic incentive model, which makes Steem like an autonomous company.

01 | Basic economic unit on Steem

The main economic in Steem blockchain is Steem crypto currency, which empowered the basic value of the community. All other economic units are derived from the value of STEEM. STEEM is a floating value crypto currency that can be bought and sold on exchanges or trading between individual via peer to peer network. It can be regarded as digital assets, similar to stocks in share market.

Steem hopes to build a community that is mostly owned and controlled by people with a long-term perspective, so users stake their STEEM and it becomes STEEM POWER (We will address this as SP from here onwards). The staked SP cannot be traded, and it takes 4 weeks to switch back to STEEM via a process of POWER DOWN. The rights and influential value in the community are also granted to users who stake their Steem to become SP, and their voting influence is proportional to the number of SP they hold, that is, users with more SPs have more voting rights in the community.

Steem blockchain generates new STEEM every day to reward individuals and also to those who have contributed to community building. The current inflation rate of STEEM is 7.82%. This year, it is estimated that 27,452,027 new STEEM coins will be produced, which will reach 40.63 million RMB according to the current value of STEEM. These STEEM toekn will all be distributed to the developers and contributor of the community in accordance with the rules defined by the Steem software.

02 | Steem community driven mechanism

a. Proof of Brain

Steem focuses on the development of social media communities. The main influence on social media communities are mainly based on content consumption. This will divide Steem into two different type of users: Content producer or bloggers produce good content, and readers who carry a role curator read good posts. In order to encourage content creator, 65% of the 27.45 million STEEM tokens are designated to rewarded to content creator where curator who pushing the upvote button on the content they see fit, so as to encourage bloggers to create high-quality content.

There is no fixed definition on quality content. In order to justify how much should a content worth, we need to rely on users who hold SP stake. Since users who hold SP are long-term stakeholders of the community, they will likely care more of the economy interest, and to reward quality content via upvote. Base on the total amount of SP a curator hold, and the time of upvote with balance amount of voting power, multiplied with the voting weight curator decided to upvote on the content, STEEM blockchain is set to calculate the amount of VEST and send them to the content creator, and the amount of upvoted VEST will be credited to the author's account 7 days from the date of author.

Other than content creator, we have content consumer role as well, we call them curator. Those are the people whom share/reblog/resteem/upvote content and help to expand a blogger’s visibility. Nobody likes to work for free, and therefore even curators has a designated reward, as curator reward. Given an upvote are supposed to reward the author, curators are entitled to 50% of the upvoted value. For example, if a post payout is supposed to be $100, half of that $50 will be split proportionate to the curators.

b. Witness

As we have earlier explored community driven quality content, Steem is in line as a self-governance social media platform. Its data storage and software upgrade iterations are also controlled by users throughout the network. Witnesses play an important role as a blockchain database book keeper. Witness nodes have the authority to add new information to the blockchain.

These governance authority are delegated to the witnesses by the community. Based on the voters SP count, the top 20 witnesses with the highest voted SP value are called super nodes. They have the permissions to add new information to the blockchain and decide which version of software the community runs.

Witnesses will also receive rewards from the Steem community. 10% of 27.45 million STEEM tokens will be rewarded to witnesses. The top 20 super nodes will receive nearly 10,000 STEEM rewards every month. Witnesses is like an outsourced partner of a company, determine the underlying software version operated by the community and lead the community forward.

c. steem.dao

The development of an organization requires the investment of various resources and elements, and development and operation are most important of all. On a yearly basis, 10% of the 27.45 million STEEM tokens are contributing to the steem.dao account, in order to pay to individual or a team who have contributed to the development and operation of Steem.

Individuals or teams submit their development and operation plans VIA SPS (Steem Proposal System), and users who hold SP vote on the proposals. The passed proposals will be rewarded by STEEM as planned, and the awarded proposer should contribute to the community as planned.

steem.dao is like a community fund, attracting developers from around the world with their resources, and contributing to the development of the Steem community. It is also like an investment committee that invests in to projects in Steem, whether it is development or operation, and the voters among them are SP holders.

d. SP holder dividends

SP holders not only have the authority to vote, but to determine how much creators will be rewarded, and using their stoke to vote for witnesses, to determine the distribution of the steem.dao fund. Other than that, stake holders are designated to receive up to 15% of the annual inflation. That is, according to the amount of SP held by them relative to the total amount of SP held by all users, they will receive a portion of 27.45 million * 15% STEEM coins in proportion.

Steem treats users in the entire network indiscriminately. No matter who they are, as long users contribute to the development of Steem Blockchain. Based on the explanation above, you can get a part of 27.45 million STEEM via these 4 different methods.

03 | SteemCommunity Revenue Model

After contributor received their STEEM payout, usually a portion of their income will be liquidated via exchanges, to turned them into cash, in order to pay for expanses. By the look of it, continuously selling of STEEM will eventually drying the value of STEEM.

In order to create a sustainable ecosystem, we believe creating demand for STEEM will ultilmately driving more value to STEEM blockchain, via different type of community, by supplying different type of front end, different type of rewarding scheme for their community users.

a. Resource credit

Unlike using the internet, there’s no restriction of data access and limitless of bandwidth. Steem requires a cost to run the entire blockchain ecosystem. And therefore, every activities involving STEEM are subjected to consumption of Resource Credit(RC). And these RC has very much related to the amount of SP you hold. The amount of SP define how much RC you can hold/recharge over time.

This creates a demand for SP, because every active user needs to hold at least 3SP. With the growth of users, the demand for resource credit will indirectly stimulate the need for staking STEEM(SP required STEEM).

b. Network Advertising

Steem's economic incentive mechanism allows a large number of content creators and curators to socially interact in the community and building communities, which will bring a lot of attention and to the social networking industries. Users (bloggers, video podcasters, advertisers) can reliably evaluate Steem's trending page and buy higher positions on their page to get more attention and potential returns. These participants can buy or lease STEEM to promote their content and their influence power.

Through this process, as advertisers choose to buy or lease STEEM to gain exposure, the demand for STEEM is increasing. Ultimately, this will drive STEEM to the worldwide advertising network.

04 | Our motive, mission andmotto

The economic incentive model provided by Steem has a huge impetus to the construction of self-governance communities. But, can it be used to develop websites, applications, online communities or even offline communities?

The answer is certain. Qu Toutiao(QTT) has designed and tokenized, and incorporate into their own community model and has achieved rapid development. Toutiao and TikTok have launched a fast version to learn from the experience of QuToutiao's token economic thinking. Jianshu and Weibo also launched Jianshuzuan and Oasis respectively, not to mention that each platform has integrated points and task systems into its own communities.

a. Layer2 for Steem

More and more online communities add incentives as a core module to their community building. However, building a set of economic incentive models is complicated and costly, and small communities or communities can only stay away.

Steem has built a perfect incentive base for us, which is open enough and runs stably for four years. As a Layer 2 based on Steem, we look forward to providing a convenient and useful incentive layer for content websites, applications, and online communities, as a bridge between them and Steem

Therefore, we developed steem4wp and steem4everyone. steem4wp enables 60 million WordPress websites to be connected to the Steem blockchain through a plug-in, bringing incentive modules to the connected websites. The goal of steem4everyone is, on the basis of steem4wp, to allow any website, application, and online community to access Steem to build its own incentive layer.

b. WhereIN Image Community

In January 2019, we launched WhereIN, a photo community based on Steem, which currently ranks among the top 200 global Dapps. WhereIN has made a good exploration of building self-governance communities for content websites, applications, and online communities. Since the WhereIN App (wherein.io) went online, the community has been self governing and self regulating at it's own pace without operating personnel.

c. Aksai community applet

On the basis of the steem4wp plug-in and the Wanzi applet (wordpress-based community applet template), we developed the aksai community applet template to help the WhereIN community build a Steem-based where applet. This small program makes up for the trouble of WhereIN users need to download App, and supports sharing of more types of content. The cost of this small program is just a server.

This provides a template for content communities and offline communities to build their own autonomous communities, with extremely low cost and no developers required.

d. Asch Witkey

In July 2020, we launched Asch Witkey (asch.io). Asch Witkey is an Asch community application. Asch is its underlying asset and Steem provides support for its social forum module. Asch Witkey provides a realistic use case of Steem to drive social forums in the blockchain community. Other blockchain projects can refer to Asch Witkey's approach and combine its advantages with the advantages of Steem-based community forums to jointly promote the community Construction and social interaction.

Furthermore, we are currently developing basic modules for ETH so that ERC20 projects based on ETH can quickly and cost-effectively build applications similar to Asch Wikey, and use Steem to promote community building and social interaction.

e. Local community social platform

DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) based on Bitcoin and Steem will play an important economic role as a new type of organization in the future. We believe that the community will play an indispensable role here.

On the basis of the Steem blockchain, we plan to build a multi-community (offline community) as the core social media platform to provide the community with simple and easy-to-use tools to promote its community development and thrive in our tokenized economy.

This platform is a bit like the offline community version of reddit and Douban. I look forward to seeing you soon.