AKASHA was, a couple of years ago, a project aligned head to head with Steemit. It had a similar vision, but diverging execution paths. And although both projects started around the same time, they are now in different positions.

There are a few significant differences between them, but, at their core, they are both social media platforms built on top of a blockchain.

I wrote about AKASHA quite a lot when it was launched, almost 2 years ago, but then, due to lack of news and a surprising slow development, my interest faded. Lately, AKASHA seemed to experience some kind of revival, though. They announced the end of the alpha stage (and the obvious start of the beta stage) and also they shared their vision about the network token.

One of the main differences between Steem and AKASHA is that AKASHA doesn't have a token (nor did they ran an ICO, obviously) but they also didn't completely repel the potential existence of a token. This ambivalent communication vibe is quite common in AKASHA's standard narrative, almost as common as the lengthy, metaphorical blog posts on their main site (which are interesting in the beginning, but tend to get rather boring after a couple of years).

In their latest blog post about the current development status, something very interesting was announced: Colored Essence. It's their idea about a token. It wasn't launched yet, and I'm having a hard time understanding if and how they will ever launch it (like I said, the blog posts are lengthy, metaphorical and lacking the practical details I'm used to when reading development blog posts). But what stroke me is the similarity with Steem's Smart Media Tokens.

So, as far as I understand, the base token of AKASHA could be something called Essence.

when trying to understand the concept of Essence, it is helpful to imagine it as a white glowing liquid which resembles water.

But on top of this Essence, one could also have (create? implement? derivate?) Colored Essence, like this:

When starting, the users will have in their balance “pure Essence” that they can use to either participate in an existing community/signal (Colors) or to create their own by coloring their Essence. On the other hand, if an user wants to remove themselves from a particular community/signal, the “Colored Essence” can be decolored back in its “pure Essence” form.

So, in Steem blockchain terms, the Essence is STEEM, and Colored Essence is the Smart Media Token that one could create on top of STEEM.

This entire paradigm looks very close to SMT. And, in a way, it validates it. Interestingly enough, it validates it before either of them tokens are even launched.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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