Steemit is an American

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

-based

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

ging and social media

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

. Users can gain a

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

, more specifically STEEM, for publishing and curating content (i.e., posts). Users can also be rewarded with STEEM based on their comments. The company is owned by Steemit Inc., a privately held

company A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether Natural person, natural, Juridical person, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members ...

based in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

and a headquarters in

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

. HIVE is the official cryptocurrency on the successful fork of the main Steem blockchain in 2020. In addition, this fork has many of the features of the main Steem blockchain and a series of original ones, such as badges.

Operating principle

Steemit is designed as a

decentralized application A decentralised application (DApp, dApp, Dapp, or dapp) is an Application software, application that can operate autonomously, typically through the use of smart contracts, that run on a decentralized computing, blockchain or other distributed le ...

(DApp) built upon the Steem

, using the eponymous

STEEM to reward users for their content. By voting on posts and comments, users get to decide the payout of those posts. Users also get "Curation Rewards" for finding and upvoting content that gets upvoted by other users afterwards.

History

On 4 July 2016, Steemit, Inc., a company founded by Ned Scott and blockchain developer Daniel Larimer, launched the

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

platform Steemit as the first application built upon the Steem blockchain. On 14 July 2016, Steemit announced on their website that they had been hacked. The attack, according to them, has compromised about 260 accounts. About US$85,000 worth of Steem Dollars and STEEM were reported to have been taken by the attackers. In March 2017, Larimer stepped back as Steemit's chief technology officer and left the company. With the STEEM price dropping during the 2018 cryptocurrency crash, Steemit faced financial difficulties and had to lay off 70% of its staff. In 2020, Steem successfully forked and the HIVE blockchain was created in the process.

References

External links

* {{cryptocurrencies, state=expanded American entertainment websites American social networking websites Cryptocurrency in the United States

Operating principle

History

References

Further reading

External links