My Letter to Coinbase for STEEM Listing

The community has recently come together to achieve the listing of #STEEM on the Netcoins platform which was a great effort and demonstrates the strength of working together to achieve common goals. This platform will provide the community access to many good and services around the world as it is accepted in over 170,000 small businesses. This is the type of expansion and liquidity needed to start an outwards push for #STEEM as a digital solution for payments. While this is a key milestone, the liquidity of our tokens has recently fallen given the extended bear market. However, our liquidity has never been a great strength for us as we have mostly only been available to transact with other cryptocurrencies through a limited numbers of exchanges.

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I think it is time that we take our efforts and influence as a community to push for additional listings in exchanges that can expand the reach to many other users or potential investors around the world. There have been initiative by many great community leaders to get this started but I recently ran into @kenmelendez’s vlog where he wrote a letter directly to Coinbase in an effort to get the initiative started again. We have recently seen, as announced by Coinbase, their expansion into additional assets. It seems that they intend to list a number of new assets to their offering over the coming months. This presents a unique opportunity to be considered for a potential listing in the future. While I think it could take time to achieve, I think it is well worth the effort as a direct to fiat gateway would increase the liquidity for our tokens and also bring potential investment to the future of the ecosystem being built. While I may repeat myself from this and other posts I have written in the past regarding this, below is my draft letter to Coinbase.

Dear Coinbase Internal Asset Selection Committee,

First, I would like to thank your Company for being a pioneer in the Cryptocurrency industry as you have allowed for millions to easily and safely access the potential of a true open financial system that could allow the world to transparently transact in a more efficient manner. Your focus on secure and easy user interface allows for an experience that is more turnkey than alternatives have done in the past. Your embrace of a truly mobile platform is definitely the key to increasing adoption so that we can allow all members of society to participate in the economy.

As many who come into the blockchain technology and Cryptocurrency revolution, I quickly became passionate about the potential the technology can serve our world and the communities that make it up. However, I have always been a person that takes time to evaluate projects and assets before taking a dive. For this reason, my immersion into the asset class has been limited to projects that have had strong fundamentals and large communities of users and developers to continue building upon the foundation of the technology Satoshi wrote about 10 years ago in the original whitepaper. Many have also seen the potential and have set off to disrupt many industries through innovative projects that seek to provide efficient access to protocols that will allow decentralized applications to run current technology without the sometime expensive influence of 3rd parties that have historically limited access to those unable to pay for said experiences.

In my now two years of research, education and investing I have learned enough to remain committed to a decentralized approach to many real world solutions. While centralization will never cease to exist, many applications would benefit enormously towards a decentralized approach for all parties involved. As I searched these, one project in particular caught my attention, Steem. I have now been a part of the Steem community since December 2017 and despite the challenging year most projects have had, I continue to feel great being part of this community as I have gotten much more out of being a member than by being an investor. Therefore, the purpose of this letter is to let the committee know why I believe that the Steem ecosystem is here to stay and would be a great addition to the powerful lineup of assets your organizations lists for its customers. I will do my best to focus on those factors listed on your Digital Asset Framework document publish in November 2017 to ensure that our interests and thought process aligns with those established by your organization.

From Steem’s whitepaper, “Steem aims to support social media and online communities by returning much of its value to the people who provide valuable contributions by rewarding them with cryptocurrency, and through this process create a currency that is able to reach a broad market, including people who have yet to participate in any cryptocurrency economy.” As we have unfortunately aware of ever so much lately, we as users of traditional centralized social media platforms have become the product with no benefit except the social engagement of our sharing. This has gotten to be quite concerning as the amount of data gathered has had the potential to expose many of us to the misuse of our names, reputation and even our decision making process. Steem looks to create a community where we can interact and engage freely and reward each other by doing so for our efforts. Therefore, Steem truly aligns with GDAC’s mission and value of achieving economic freedom in a decentralized platform. While also being innovative, I can tell you that I have seen many users from around the world that have come to Steem to share their challenges living in places where there is no true freedom or access to a basic income.

From a technology perspective, I have been amazed about how simple it has been to interact with the Steem blockchain. The flexibility has allowed for an ecosystem of decentralized applications to be created with very user friendly interfaces. Not being a technical expert on code has not limited me from engaging on the platform as the interfaces to the blockchain have been easy to navigate and the creation of new and engaging DApps have made it a very interactive and diverse experience. For example, an fitness DApp called @actifit was launched months ago and has incentivized me to track my workouts by rewarding me for my daily activities. Another DApp @steemhunt has setup a great community of interesting product hunters that provide great information for a number of interesting and innovative technology for our everyday use. Lastly, @steemmonsters has recently launched a trading card game where you can not only collect cards owned and tokenized on the blockchain but also play with them digitally with users from around the world as a form of entertainment. The development continues as @coingecko reports the protocol to have an 88% developer score considering their tracking of the source code repositories. In a demonstration of its superior technology, Steem continues to enjoy being a Top 5 blockchain regarding its activity according to the Blocktivity site where use and scalability are measured in comparison to other protocols. Lastly in Technology, its governance continues to prove to be reliable as the protocol itself has been put through 20 Hard Forks and continues to have strong support despite challenges experienced as normal in these forks.

While I am no lawyer and cannot being to understand the challenges faced with both the Companies trying to deploy solutions to its customers and the regulators seeking to ensure that the customers and investors are adequately protected, the Steem protocol has made all of its users stakeholders. Its Delegated Proof of Stake concept has allowed for users to join with no material barriers as the communities themselves now have the ability to onboard and bring new users. Most also delegate a portion of their stakes to allow for the to transact and start be rewarded for their contributions to the ecosystem. Therefore, Steem itself is a utility in that it provides its users the bandwidth necessary to transact on the blockchain. The witnesses that oversee the protocol have the ecosystem’s best interests in mind as they have also been active in developing continuing solutions to protect the users from unwanted access and phishing attacks to account security. I think this helps with the integrity and reputation of the community’s long term view of the Steem ecosystem.

Many of the other factors listed in the Company’s framework are somewhat more objective to each person’s thoughts. For example, as a person who looks at the long term of Steem being great, the market demand and supply is a secondary concern as the ecosystem created allows me to transact and engage the way I want to within the ecosystem. However, as mentioned, development continues to provide ways to improve these interactions with markets as @blocktrades, for example, is a go to place to swap and create markets for many cryptocurrency assets. Also, some wallets have been created to allow for the better transactional use of the assets for good and services. While most demand stems from the internal use of the bandwidth created by holding a stake, we have also started to see crowdsourcing efforts with @fundition taking place within the ecosystem with Steem and SBD as the funding currency. However, a major limiting factor comes as there is a lack of a market for fiat currencies. It is also why a major partnership with a reputable exchange like Coinbase can make a great difference.

The listing of Steem on your exchanges could help in the adoption efforts as it could provide an easier way for those developing these innovative DApps to bring in more users to the great ecosystem that is being created here. Your recent listings of 0x and the Basic Attention Token demonstrate your support of great decentralized applications for the growing community of those seeking an option from centralized platform looking to leverage the attention of a community. Steem would integrate well with this vision as the efforts to reward users for their creation and attention without the concerns of being censored or exploited are aligned with the efforts of decentralization happening around us in the development and progression of blockchain technology. I hope this letter brings additional thoughts for a potential listing. I would also invite you to visit the platform and the many outlets that we have to have great discussions on the vision for Steem. I am sure that if you could live it, you would see why the long term success and adoption of Steem would also bring great success to your organization and the projects you currently support on its platform.

As I typed the letter, I felt a great passion and commitment to #STEEM which I knew I already had but it also got me excited on the achievements we have made as a community in the short time I have been here. However, I know that I am still learning about this ecosystem and its potential and its challenges. Therefore, I would love if you can not only become inspired to write your own letter to Coinbase but would also love if you could share me your thoughts and feedback on how I could improve the letter before sending it. I will be traveling later this week so would like to get your comments below before end of week so I can send the letter both via email and physical mail. I appreciate your support in this effort.

Follow me on Twitter: @NAICrypto

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