There are three main currencies in Steemit: Steem, Steem Power (SP) and Steem Backed Dollars (SBD).
Steem is liquid and can be bought in an exchange and converted into steem dollars or steem power.
Steem Power is basically Steem that is locked in a vesting fund for 3 months. Users can use steem power to upvote content and get curating rewards. When a user upvotes content his steem power gets depleted and then slowly regenerated. Steem Power holders receive interest from their holdings. The more Steem Power a voter has the more revenue he’ll generate for himself (in form of SP) and for the content creator (In SBD).There is also an incentive to upvote content early, as the rewards are distributed according to time. The earliest votes gets the biggest share of the reward.
Steem Backed Dollars are there to protect content creators from volatility and can be traded for roughly 1 usd worth of steem, in order to cash out from steem. Converting Steem backed dollars into STEEM takes 5 days. Users also recieve interest from holding SBD.
Underneath the hood of Steemit.com there is a tradeable cryptocurrency token, called Steem, and it’s performing well on the US-based exchange, bittrex.com, and blockchain-based exchange openledger.info. With Steemit.com, posts, comments and votes are immutable. Attribution is a given. Accreditation is not taken for granted. And community appreciation is an actual reward.
