Here's a simple idea.

The best universal way of coming up with solutions is to attach incentives around any given problems. Start-up accelerators and VCs illustrate this well enough from an investor's perspective. Zooming out into the story of societies, it's clear to see that communities always emerge and revolve around resources. Place a candy in the middle of nowhere and the ants will come. For us, this goes from material to human capital.

When I joined Steemit back in mid-2016, I was certainly fascinated by the potentials of Steem the instant I used it. The general idea here is for anyone to contribute anything at all to the Steem network and subsequently get rewarded with tokens through community voting. Transactions are also free and almost instantaneous, rendering the experience seamless without the usual oddities of blockchain technology. This blew my mind back then, and I've written about how it could potentially enable companies to be more open, porous organisations. Anyone can now tap into a global pool of human resources to improve their ventures with the Steem protocol, breaking down the barrier between producers and engaged consumers.

However, Steem alone is not going to flourish long-term without playing to the strengths of sub-communities. Major, all-encompassing currencies are too encumbered to properly house many diverse values, in my opinion. It's a matter of communities being able to create and curate relevant contributions without the friction of social complexity and conflicts of interest. So in theory, different communities are best optimised through the use of different social currencies. In a nutshell:-

• Huge communities with large capital reserves are relatively less defined, messy, and lossy when it comes to distribution. This disadvantage of diversity also has its advantages, of course. Drawing parallels to the real world, the bootstrapping of the Steem economy over the past year has created a plethora of general works from open-contributions. This includes the many different forms of production, curation, and community regulation.

• Inversely, small communities with limited capital reserves are relatively more defined, organised, and lossless. Compared with large communities, niche communities are more manageable with better focus, which may lead to better chances of generating good revenue streams. Just like any enterprises.

This is why SMTs are game-changers.

In essence, projects, communities, and currencies are merging with the advent of decentralisation technologies. All projects revolve around communities anyway, being social in nature. The insight here is the importance of rewarding project contributors to spur growth. Steem is already enabling this universally, and SMTs could very well take this concept to the moon. With the right incentives and workflow in place, SMTs could pave the way for better communities as it is conceivably easier to reward contributors and work on achieving goals. That said, SMTs will also benefit from the general works produced by content creators, curators, and regulators coming from the larger Steem community.

It all seems to me like a fundamental breakthrough for just about anyone to start creating their own currencies and communities, leveraging on both the blockchain infrastructure and capital liquidity available on Steem. Low-barrier deployment. Everyone can get involved because the basic level of participation is simply social contribution, in which complexity can be built upon. This will become clearer as we subscribe to different SMTs, aligning our interests and maximising our returns. For early adopters, we now have a great reason to use Steem to bootstrap projects on the platform, just like how early adopters of Ethereum are using ethers to fund the ERC-20 token projects.

The simplicity of Steem and Smart Media Tokens is likely to light up many ideas, even for non-technical adopters who are usually excluded from the process of creating their own cryptocurrencies. With SMTs on the horizon, it's now definitely a great time to start figuring out ways to get involved in building awesome communities. For one, I am thinking about making my favourite website https://aeon.co operate on SMTs, creating a collaborative economy between great writers, editors, and other relevant contributors.

The same goes for the indie electronic music industry in which I am interested in. Pretty sure there will be many use cases for anyone that could benefit from having a loyalty-points system - be it the local hipster coffee joint, or a family's newspaper company. All we have to do is take a look around for ways to innovate, and this includes bridging traditional ventures out there. Problem-solving with Steem and SMTs could be a big part of future communities. Is this one of those basic layers that will define the evolution of the World Wide Web? Let's make it happen.

Resources

1. Steem's SMT website: https://smt.steem.io/
2. SMT whitepaper: https://smt.steem.io/smt-whitepaper.pdf

Image source: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

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