THE STREET ANALYSTS

Steem is the incredibly fast, fee-less cryptocurrency of Steemit, a social media platform, which focuses on rewarding the users, through payments of Steem.

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Steemit, which is most like Reddit, is based on the blockchain which allows it to be run in a decentralised manner. This allows no censorship, data vulnerability or data abuse, something that users of more traditional social medias often worry about. Censorship in social medias has been at the forefront of the news this week as trump got banned from twitter, and the free-speech worshipping Parler lost support from amazon.

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However, Steem believe it is their reward scheme that is the main selling point of Steemit. They think that by rewarding those that create the content for the site in Steem coin, they will get the best content for their site, increasing its userbase, bringing more content and more users. The creators become stakeholders in Steem, keeping control of their data and earning the rewards for their contributions. So far, Steem has paid out $59,595,935 in rewards to content creators.

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But it is not just this that Steem is proud to flaunt. Steem can process more transactions than both Bitcoin and Ethereum, clocking in at an impressive 1,169,182 total transactions every 24 hours.

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Steem is also different to other cryptocurrencies as it does not rely on just mining to create new coins. Since its release in 2016, the supply of Steem has doubled each year, and it will continue to do so. 75% of these new coins will go to the authors and creators, 15% are rewarded to the holders of Steem Power and just 10% are rewarded to miners.

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Steem Power is a separate cryptocurrency which is used to symbolise the power of a user on Steemit. Steem Power makes your actions on Steem carry more weight, so a vote from a user with 50 SP will have 5 times the impact of a vote from a user with 10 SP. This is important as the rewards from posts are based on the Steem Power of those that voted for it.

The Steem blockchain also has Steem Dollars, which is intended to be valued 1:1 with USD. It has held that value well in the past, except for at the end of 2017 when it shot up to $13, bit it came down again quickly, however it has come up again and is values at a little over $3 today.  

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All 3 currencies on the Steem blockchain can be converted to one-another, or into bitcoin, where it can then be converted into fiat currency.

Today, Steemit has 1,238,717 registered users, and after its launch on the 24th of March 2016, has had strong and continuous growth. The Steem coin itself should not be held for a long time as more and more of it is made daily, however due to the ease of transaction using Steem, with each one taking around 3 seconds to complete, it can be easily converted to either of the other currencies on the Steem blockchain, or into other cryptocurrencies.

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Steemit seems to have a bright future ahead of it, as more and more social media users worry for their data, and grow tired of not being rewarded for their work, having to rely on external sponsorships to earn a living doing what they love.