Steem is based as regards the Smart Media Tokens (SMT) protocol, developed by Steemit. As of December 2017, CoinMarketCap.com listed Steem considering a $475 million name capitalization, and ranked Steem tokens 32nd of 1,358 cryptocurrencies. User activities, such as upvoting facilitates Steem's Proof-of-Brain algorithm, which afterward factors in the Steem Power a user holds, to pay for incentives for content creators and the community by transferring little amounts of the Steem token currency.[10]

Steem began by now a very inflationary supply model, doubling just not quite speaking all year.[6] However, due to community request, upon December 6, 2016 the inflation rate of Steem was tainted to 9.5% per year, reducing by 0.5% per year