Major Milestone: Steem Blockchain Hits 1 Million Accounts

Steem, a blockchain rewards platform that allows content publishers to monetize their work, announced today that the project has reached one million registered accounts. An update from the official Steemit blog confirms the one millionth registration on the blockchain, and shows even more impressive stats on transactions, user activity, and unique visitors.

Steem is exploding in popularity. Not only is the steemit.com blogging and social media platform drawing large numbers of visitors, but also other DApps (decentralized applications) that use the Steem blockchain, such as dtube, busy, and dlive.

Steem’s History

In 2016, Steemit is a social media platform that encourages quality content production and discussions with a voting system. Votes translate to Steem and Steem Dollars (SBD) tokens, which can be exchanged for real money or other digital assets. The Steemit platform acts as an alternate way to earn income for content publishers who usually have to rely on obtrusive ads or paywalls. Steem also says that helps publishers who are frustrated with:

• Tips and donations are not viable due to the expense of processing micro-payments
• Huge social networks like Facebook take profits from publishers but don’t share revenue

However, the project has long-standing struggles with bots and malicious players who try to game the voting system, as the popular user @kevinwong writes. Still, the numbers do speak for themselves, as Steemit had only 2,000 active users in 2016. Also, according to the project’s website, it has so far paid out $40,154,371 USD in rewards since June 2016.

Sticking to a Core Mission

As the blockchain industry has grown, many projects have taken criticism for lacking direction, solving problems that don’t need solving or that are already solved by other solutions.

Steem’s core mission for rewarding publishers with an open blockchain has stayed consistent, however, which is a component of its success. It has attracted developers’ interest with the technologies open, interoperable architecture, and solid documentation. This has led to an explosion in content-based DApps that interact with the blockchain, often in unique, first-of-its kind ways. When the content publishing industry is low on ideas for monetizing content and has drawn flak from consumers, Steem offers an interesting take.

Ned Scott re-affirmed these ideals recently in a panel at the Consensus 2018 conference. “For me it’s all about building networks and empowering people,” he said. In the panel, he goes into depth about the ways Steem cryptocurrency builds on the ideas of showing users’ influence that were already established by platforms like Reddit and Digg.