A Developers Perspective On The Future of Steem

You have not heard much about it yet, but I have been working on @sugarsteem which is an up and coming Steem user interface with some bold and ambitious goals of being an awesome Steem blockchain UI.

Now that I am well and truly in the build process and making good ground, I thought I would share my perspective on the future of Steem from a technological platform perspective.

Unlike many in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space, I do not believe that cryptocurrencies will ever replace fiat. Fiat currency is here to stay and if it were to be replaced by cryptocurrency, it would be a government-created cryptocurrency.

However, I do wholeheartedly believe that blockchain technology is going to revolutionise so many things from voting to inventory management, counterfeit reduction, copyright protection, social networks and other areas where blockchain technology can apply.

From a development perspective, Steem is the easiest blockchain out there to build web applications on. Even though the documentation sucks and it can be a minefield working out how to do certain things, I still found it easy to work with using my existing front-end development experience.

I say this having experimented with EOS which at present has a high barrier to entry to build applications on. Maybe as the tooling gets better and they reduce the barriers it will become more approachable, but EOS is often touted as a Steem replacement and honestly, I cannot see that being the case right now.

I also helped out a local startup with an Ethereum application and started working on an ambitious travel platform on top of Ethereum I started and never finished.

There are some things I like about Solidity, but it feels unnecessary to have a proprietary language when Javascript is already an established and popular web language with numerous supersets like TypeScript. This is why the Ethereum team are following the lead of EOS and looking at WebAssembly for its smart contracts.

I have also worked with Bitcoin and Litecoin, which are one of the same and feel very primitive as they're not platform-oriented projects forcing you to create abstractions and deal with horrendously outdated RPC calls to wallets or web nodes.

When Smart Media Tokens launch in 2019, Steem will undoubtedly explode in popularity. Ethereum right now is considered the king of blockchain development platforms, but it's hard to deny that zero fees and almost instant transactions on Steem are way better.

It is for this reason once Sugar Steem launches and gets into a nice spot, it is the intention that I will take this learned knowledge and use it to improve the Steem development ecosystem. There are a lot of areas for improvement from tooling to documentation.

The future of Steem is bright. The cryptocurrency aspect of Steem is a nice bonus, but the ability to build truly decentralised and fast web applications on top of it is unrivalled. We have not seen anything yet.