Steem, a digital currency you earn for posting on a social network, soars to $197m in 2 weeks
Date
July 13, 2016 - 11:09AM
Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss
'Trending' posts seen on the Steemit website, along with the amount each post has earnt its author in Steem.
Steem, the digital currency behind the new social media website Steemit, soared more than 1000 per cent in value on Tuesday to over $US150 million ($197 million), two weeks after it first paid people who posted on its website, according to coinmarketcap.com.
Steemit essentially is a website that rewards or pays users who post content that gets multiple thumbs up from the site's participants. The reward given is the steem currency. Content on the site is not limited to digital currencies and users have posted varied topics from lasagna to a trip to North Africa.
"It's basically an incentivised social media platform," said Steemit's chief executive, Ned Scott, in an interview.
The steem currency's price on Tuesday was $1.75, equivalent to a market cap of $151.8 million. That is the value of the 81.6 million steems in circulation. On July 4, when Steemit first paid users with steem for their content, the currency's value was only $13 million, according to Scott.
Steem is the fifth-largest digital currency in terms of market cap. Coinmarket cap.com tracks a total of 657 digital currencies.
Digital currencies have gained broad appeal among investors as a mechanism to transfer assets without a third party or clearing agency.
Users who get the steem currency can then exchange it for bitcoins within the platform. They can use their bitcoins to pay for services or goods or hold them as an investment.
Steemit is similar to social media websites Reddit and Facebook in the way it operates. Unlike the two, however, Steemit is powered by blockchain, the underlying technology that anchors digital currencies such as bitcoin.
The new social media website was launched on an experimental basis without the rewards on May 4.
"There were many, many people looking at this project, several hundreds of users per day," said Scott. "And when they experienced that first payout on July 4, they bought something for their mother, they paid debt. And it suddenly felt real to everyone."
Steems are created solely by the platform's blockchain, whereas bitcoin is generated through a mining process where a miner tries to solve a set of complex mathematical problems.
Scott said the company had a "superangel" investor that helped it get off the ground last February. It will use this momentum to raise funds from institutional investors.
Reuters
This was a very brilliant idea I must say.
The rise is vivid and it's hard to predict how far this innovation would go.
Let's steem !!
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Scalable to the end of the world. ;)
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That sounds just abut right - fair judgement.
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It seems like every time the site has trouble the value rises drastically afterwards.
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We are coming out stronger than ever.
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With this amount of steem people are gonna think we all vape!
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I think Steemit will be the second of capitalization among the cryptocurrency to the end of the month.
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I think we just scratched the surface when it come to what we can do with steem. I already changing the landscape of social media and user driven content.
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I think quite a few job descriptions will change due to the innovations that steemit is introducing to the world. Many people are expecting blockchains to make a huge impact on society. Steemit.com is showing the way with a mass adoption working platform, that demonstrates exactly the power of blockchains, once the technical bits are covered and partially hidden from the user.
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I don't think STEEM has gotten anywhere near its peak. The July 4th Event brought in people who already used Cryptocurrency, because that is mainly who heard about it then. Then Reuters, CNBC, The Guardian, etc, brought it to the Public's attention, and during this same time all the CrpytoCurrency people and their friends and the Media and their friends and the people getting information from the Media and their friends, were all learning about STEEM at the same time. So it went up to $5 very quickly from around .70-.80cents, then stabilized around $3-$4.
There are still peaks to come. What about when Steemit gets its 1st Famous Band, or Famous Actor to join. Or when it gets its First Billionaire investor. Or when a Country starts making Laws specifically about STEEM, that will drive all kinds of News and Attention. That is the same way Bitcoin got to $1,000. When Countries would announce Bitcoin rules, or Ban Bitcoin, it drove huge amounts of people to start using it, because they didn't even know what it was until they heard that some country banned it.
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It just another learning curve and it will come back stronger.
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With a market cap of only under 2.5% of the entire cryptocurrency market, there's a lot of potential upside still to come!
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