An Overview of Steem – a Blockchain-based Social Media Model

Bringing the qualities of Blockchain to the domain of online social networking, Steem facilitates the development of social media DApps that can reward users with cryptocurrency. Steem is interesting! It interests developers, entrepreneurs, HODLers, social users and content creators. It can be referred as a blockchain-based social media model that supports community building and social interaction through content publishing and sharing. What makes it more fascinating and unique is that it incentivizes the contributors with cryptocurrency rewards for their contributions like blogging, publishing, content curation, voting, and sharing.

Steem publicizes its value as a public content platform by referring to the point that user-generated content has earned millions for the shareholders of social media platforms, but the content creators make nothing in terms of revenue. Steem is different because it empowers the users to become shareholders and earn value for creating and publishing content over Steem-based social apps. This article will cover more details about Steem, its anatomy and its potential to support entrepreneurial ideas for content and social networking businesses.

• What is  Steem Blockchain?
• How Steem Blockchain produces a new block?
• How are rewards distributed among Steem users?
• Who can benefit from Steem?
• Why develop on Steem?
• How LeewayHertz can help you with Steem DApp Development?

What is  Steem Blockchain?

Steem is a social blockchain – a publicly accessible database that stores immutable content in the form of plain text. And as mentioned above, it is powered by an in-built incentivization mechanism that rewards the content contributors and distributors with its cryptocurrency, also called STEEM.

One important point to understand here is that Steem is the publicly accessible distributed blockchain database that stores all of the records like text content, transactions data; even the reward calculations and payouts are performed on it. But for content creators and users to interact with the Steem Blockchain and view the data on it, a frontend web interface is needed, which is offered through Steem DApps. For instance, Steemit is a social DApp built on Steem blockchain that rewards Steem tokens to its users.

With its inbuilt incentivization mechanism, the Steem blockchain strives to create a currency that can reach a broader market, including people who are yet to participate in any cryptocurrency economy. Let’s understand the Steem Blockchain a little more in detail.

How Steem blockchain produces a new block?

For creating blocks, the Steem blockchain uses a consensus mechanism called delegated proof of stake, or DPOS. This model uses “witnesses” instead of “miners” to produce blocks. Here, Witnesses represents a set of people who own the block-creating accounts. The whole Steem community, means all those who have Steem accounts, can vote to elect the witnesses. Each account holder can vote for up to 30 witnesses. The community elects 20 full-time witnesses, and the backup witnesses share the 21st position. These 21 witnesses act as the network’s block producers and governance body. Each witness requires producing a new block every 3 seconds. Thus 21 witnesses produce 21 blocks in each 63-seconds. For creating each block, the witnesses are compensated with Steem Power.

How are rewards distributed among Steem users?

The most interesting thing about Steem is its reward system. The rewards are distributed to the Steem users, who produce and curate content, participate in content discussions, and vote on the content. Each year, 75% of the yearly inflation is distributed as a reward to the contributing users. The distribution model depends upon the voting patterns of the users, but the vast majority of the rewards are distributed to the users who engage with the most popular content.

Users also get a share of the new coins generated during the block creation. With BTC(Bitcoin), 100% of the new coins created during block creation are allocated to miners. But with the Steem blockchain, only 10% of the new STEEM coins are paid to the witnesses, while the other 90% of the coins are awarded to content curators, producers and Steem Power holders.

As per the official site of Steem, as of June 2021, $59,595,935 rewards have been paid out to Steem users.

Who can benefit from Steem?

The official website of Steem speaks to entrepreneurs, developers, social users and HODLers.

• Social users can be engaged with Steem by creating accounts on Steem-based social apps like Steemit, DTube, and Utopian. By creating and curating content on these Steem social apps, users can get rewarded with free Steem tokens. Steemit is one of the top DApp built on the Steem blockchain. It is a social media and blogging website.
• Entrepreneurs like online content businesses, publishers, online communities can build their own  reward-based social media platform on Steem Blockchain by developing Steem DApps. The in-built incentivization mechanism of Steem helps businesses to reward their users for contributing good content. This increases the influence of the social app and thereby can attract more user engagement. Steem is uniquely designed to run real-time applications that facilitate fee-free and near-instant transactions. The Blockchain has been tested by over 1 million people on more than 324 Steem-based DApps.
• HODLers can engage in the trading (buying, selling and earning) of Steem tokens. There are three types of Steem tokens:
  • STEEM is a liquid token for short term traders
  • Steem Power(SP) is a vesting token for HODLers
  • SBD is a stable coin pegged to USD

Users of Steem-based social apps can earn free Steem tokens by creating and curating content.  Steem account holders can buy all three types of Steem tokens from Poloniex using other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, and Dash. Those who don’t have Steem accounts can buy Steem-based tokens from popular exchanges like Binance, Upbit, Bittrex and GOPAX.

Why develop on Steem?

There are main reasons why content businesses or their developers would love to develop app on Steem Blockchain

• Steem has built-in content-specific primitives as it has been designed from the ground to power web and content applications
• It supports near-instant fee-less transactions, so in a way, businesses can use it for free. They don’t need to build their own Blockchain for developing engaging social DApps for community building and social interactions.  Also, using Steem-powered applications, businesses can encourage users to post and engage on their platform by instantly incentivizing them for free with Steem’s turnkey cryptocurrency -STEEM
• Another biggest advantage of building on Steem is that it addresses the challenge of user acquisition, which is the hardest and most expensive part of developing and launching a new application. A Steem DApp gains immediate access to Steem’s one million-plus user base that is growing exponentially.

How LeewayHertz can help you with Steem DApp Development?

As a blockchain development company, we love to develop app on Steem for its passionate open-source developer base. It includes an entire ecosystem of powerful tools, App base API, resources, and tutorials that facilitates easier Steem integration. A Steem project can be developed using a JavaScript library or a Python library. We can assist you with the following Steem DApp development services:

• Steem DApp Development: Blockchain-based DApps have one major advantage over centralized apps, that no central point controls their performance. Our team of blockchain developers is equipped with the necessary resources and expertise to efficiently pull up your Steem DApp development project.
• DApp Design: To ensure that the users of your Steem DApp get the finest frontend user experience, we offer UI/UX design services and create DApp designs that are intuitive and simple.
• DApp Testing: We provide, end-to-end testing and QA services to ensure that your Steem DApp is bug-free and error-free before its launch.

If you want to develop an app on Steem Blockchain for your business, you can get in touch with the Steem experts at LeewayHertz. With their profound knowledge of blockchains, like Steem, our developers can help you hit it big!