This is When SMT's/Communities Will Be Launching

There's one thing that's on everyone's mind, lately (at least if you're a denizen of the Steem blockchain). That question is: when will communities and SMT's be launching?

For those of you who are new, or who haven't been on the Steem dApps in a while, the communities update is a massive overhaul of the architecture on top and within the Steem blockchain. It's supposed to allow for more communal interactions, although whether this will be something forum-like or altogether different from what we've seen remains to be seen. They've been playing it pretty close to the chest and while an update nearly a month ago talked a little about the nuts and bolts that would be changing in order to make communities possible, it didn't say much about the communities themselves.

SMT's are Smart Media Tokens. Communities are meant to revolutionize Steemit, but SMT's are aiming to revolutionize the internet and the world. Imagine if each site on the net that featured a forum or community could reward it's participants with a token that was based on Steem? Well, this is what Steemit Inc is looking to do with SMT's.

But the nagging question since the announcement of both of these new features has been: when the hell are they coming out? Ned and Steemit Inc have been very vague about this, and in my opinion with good reason. Optimistically, @ned has said many times that SMT's would launch at the beginning of this year. As we saw, that really didn't happen. Ultimately, through updates on the @steemitblog site we can infer that they decided to dig deeper and make more changes to the platform that would make SMT's operate as well as possible, and this probably took a bit longer than expected.

While the Steemit Inc. team continues to grow, remember that it's still relatively small given the sorts of things it is trying to accomplish. This is the first thing that we have to take into account. If we start here, we can create a pretty good guess about when both communities and SMT's are coming out.

In a different post many weeks ago I predicted that we wouldn't here about SMT's before the end of April. Apparently I was right. Now it's time to recalculate based on the announcement of communities.

Coders don't release major changes all at once. They always get one thing 'live' before moving onto the next. It's also likely that communities will launch before SMT's, as it's a smaller change and requires less resources than SMT's ultimately will. The update to the Steem blockchain that was mentioned recently, Hivemind, also seems to suggest this.

Steemit Inc. has been pretty good about releasing major updates to the blockchain (called Hardforks) about every half a year or so. If the current trend continues, then we can expect the Hivemind Hardfork (Hardfork 21, I believe - this will be the one containing communities) to happen in two or three months. This assumes that the company growth is able to sustain their current pace despite devoting what I expect is a nice chunk of their resources to SMT's. So, the earliest we can expect to hear about the Communities update based on their current pace is a few months from now in late June or early July.

With this update out of the way, Steemit Inc. will be able to deliver its full attention to SMT's (which are mostly probably being developed by it's own, independent team. So it remains to be seen how much their development will be effect by the release of this update. But they're likely to be positively effected to some extent.). SMT's require several things to happen before a full release. One of the things that must happen is testnet, or a "pre" version of the software infrastructure to SMT's that will test them in a real world environment against the load of several users, and against real world complications. You can bet your bottom dollar that the first version of SMT's will not launch less than a few months from the release of the this 'alpha' test net.

So how far are we from this test net?

Well, as I said earlier, devs don't like to release several major changes at once. So after communities are released (assuming they're released first) we can expect another gap of at least several months before we even get a whiff of the SMT test net.

Where does that leave us?

Here's my minimum (i.e. it'll take at least this much time) and maximum (i.e. it probably won't take longer than this unless there are major complications) timeline prediction:

Communities Update: Coming after late June, before late August.

SMT (Smart Media Tokens) Testnet Release: Coming between mid September and late November.

SMT's 1.0: Coming between December 2018 and early 2019 (before late April 2019).

For those of you who were hoping it'd be this year... Sorry, but that's virtually impossible given what we currently know about the company, it's release schedule, and it's capacity. It's true that Steemit Inc. recently went through a massive restructuring that was supposed to improve it's operation many fold. However, in order to beat the schedule that I've laid out, they'd have to be better by many orders of magnitude, unrealistic for a company that isn't even half a decade old. Also if that were the case, I feel like we'd have a sense of it from the blog updates.

I'm pretty confident in my predictions, but what do you guys think? Actually, I feel like my estimates are pretty generous on the minimum end and conservative on the maximum end, but I'd like to hear your thoughts down in the comments.

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