How much innovations Steem brought to the blockchain technology.

First ever revolutionary usage of blockchain was Bitcoin introduced in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It provided the opportunity to anybody to send or receive (crypto) currency though Internet without any middleman using P2P blockchain protocol. It was a great innovation on top of P2P technology.

Then a plethora of clones such as Litecoin, Feathercoin, Monacoin ensued. However, to provide secure and immutable transactions, Bitcoin mining takes energy equivalent of country such as Denmark or New Zealand. It is a lots of energy, some may say wasted.

Next, Sunny King introduced first proof-of-stake (PoS) technology in PeerCoin. But Peercoin had both PoW and PoS. NextCoin introduced pure PoS based cryptocurrency. Later, Bitshares introduced Delegated PoS (DPoS). DASH and Monero later added privacy to PoW blockchain which means transaction between parties will be unteachable.

Steem is based on DPoS but but has added a reward system that is called Proof-of-Brain (PoB) on top of DPoS. Moreover, Steem also introduced fee less transaction using Resource Credit (RC). Though Steem transactions are not exactly free, but requires one time investment in RC by powering up some Steem. There are few other coins such as Nano or IOTA which are also fee-less, but has little usage other than transactions.

Ethereum introduced smart contracts based on ERC20 protocol. With ERC20 anybody can create a smart contract and create their own cryptocurrency which was a big game changer. It created one of the biggest bubble in the tech industry known as ICO bubble.

With @steem-engine SCOT, a side chain, smart contract and token similar to ERC20 is already possible on Steem. It means that Steem can already provide services similar to ERC20 protocol from ETH. Moreover, these Tokens can be used for PoB rewardpool.

Moreover, with SMT release, Steem will have its native token technology.

DASH and BTS are the first coins that introduced worker proposal which means that certain percentage of the inflation will be used for development of the chain. Steem included this feature known as Steem Proposal System (SPS) in HF21.

It may seem that Steem has repertoire of all the innovations that blockchain brought to the table such as high speed (3 second) and scalable transactions (10K TPS), fee less transactions, on chain governance using DPoS, PoB mining (rewardpool), smart contracts, tokens, name based account or wallet. However, Steem is anathema to privacy which means that every transaction is absolutely visible and traceable.

Steem also boast one of the few blockchains that has more than one million accounts. It has one of highest numbers of DApps and off course, most popular DApps too.

Unfortunately, blockchains such as EOS, TRON, Cardano which promise to build a chain that Steem has already achieved have more than billion valuation. These chains promise, but Steem is already delivering.

Then why Steem has valuation of 20X smaller, mere $50M. In short, it is EOS who has taken all the credit from Steem through its charismatic leader @dan, intelligent marketing and finally, the luck factor, lunching ICO at the peak of bull market to bring in $4 billion dollar. @dan's exit and other missteps from STINC along with bear market have done lots of branding damage to Steem, form which it is still recovering.

Though Steem is superior in usage and technology to its well known peers, it lacks branding (e.g. marketing), exchanges (e.g. volumes), has bad timing (e.g. no ICOsand as a result, perennial ICO through Steemit's programatic selling). Thus it has very low valuation.

How can it be changed?

A ninja rebranding after SMT release, reduction of Steem for rewardpool and finally, a full easy-to-use package to develop DApp and SMT can bring the lost glory to the Steem. Steem may find this path may through community (i.e. decentraliztion) rather than centralized effort from other chains (e.g. TRON or EOS). STINC's continual demise (e.g. reduction of stakes) is helping the decentralized effort to overcome its limitation though slowly.

Disclaimer: This opinion is not a financial advice, it my personal perspective and opinion. Please seek professionals for financial decisions.

Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.

Thanks for reading.
@dtrade
Cryptominer , occasional trader and tech blogger since 2013