New Top-level Steem menu on BlockTrades web site

The observant user of BlockTrades may have recently noticed a new top-level menu on our site called Steem. Under this menu are three new options:

• Buy Steem Account
• Buy Steem Power
• Buy Steem Delegation

The latter two menu options are simply shortcuts for first-time users that set up the coin selectors on the Quick Trade page to buy either steem power or a steem power delegation. Until today, the first link just took the user to an “Exchange temporarily unavailable” page because we were still doing last minute work on our new account creation feature.

New Steem accounts now available for sale on BlockTrades

But we are happy to announce the feature is now live on the site, and users can purchase new Steem accounts with different cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, bitshares, bitusd, bitcny, biteur, dash, doge, ethereum, litecoin, steem, and SBD.

Simplifies Steem purchases for first-time Steem buyers

Several services already exist for creating steem accounts, of course, but the focus of our service is on enabling new Steem users to rapidly buy an account and get some Steem in one easy step. During the account creation process, our site tells the user the minimum amount to pay to buy the account (the equivalent of 7 Steem as of this post, most of which ends up as Steem Power in the new account). Any additional funds sent to the deposit address beyond the minimum amount will automatically be used to purchase Steem for the new account.

Optional backup service to protect against password loss

We expect many users of our Steem account creation service to be relatively inexperienced in cryptocurrency management. Users of traditional centralized services have been trained to expect that they can always regain control of their account if they lose their password. Despite numerous warnings, new users do occasionally lose their passwords, resulting in a total loss of the funds in their Steem account. To better support these users, we’re offering an optional backup service where we keep their password on our secure server. Users can subscribe to our optional backup service by clicking a check box during account creation, whereupon our site will display additional warnings associated with use of our backup service.

We don’t charge any additional fee for the optional backup service, so we don’t make any guarantee that we will be able to recover a user’s password in the event of loss and we specifically disclaim any associated liability, but in practice we believe it will provide an extra safety net for new users who take advantage of the service.