I've had some thoughts that I'd like to share. Some people have expressed concern over the falling satoshi value (STEEM vs. BTC) of STEEM. It's a valid concern.
Check this chart out: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/#charts
Look at the yellow graph. That's STEEM in BTC.
At the inception of Steem in the spring of 2016, its price both in terms of dollars and BTC was clearly higher than now. In the summer of 2016, there was a mad pump in the price followed by a crash. Each pump in terms of BTC value was smaller than the previous one. STEEM/BTC seems to have found its all time low a couple of weeks ago. Since then, it has recovered somewhat.
It's easy to explain what went down in 2016 as some kind of an anomaly. That was a very strange time indeed on Steem. Steem is by far not the only chain having an unrealistic initial token price.
But what happened after March 2017 when the recovery started begs for an explanation. I believe the fault for that negative development lies in that Steemit Inc underdelivered in a big way. It burned tens of millions of dollars and had little to show for it. The company was mismanaged and there must have been rampant waste and inefficiency. Based on what the new CEO, Eli Powell, has said in public, Steemit Inc has been successful at cutting costs and finding ways to generate revenue from steemit.com. MIRA, a set of interfaces acting as an adapter between RocksDB (a high-performance database capable of being stored on solid state disks instead of RAM) and the existing blockchain code is ready to be rolled out. MIRA will cut down the cost of running a full Steem node much lower. Most importantly, Steem-Engine has the equivalent of SMTs implemented on a side chain (data stored on the main chain but validated by servers other than Steem nodes) and also smart contracts. Very simply put, the whole ecosystem is in much better shape than ever before regardless of the low STEEM price. Obviously, the price is bad and something needs to be done about it.
What I think should be done next is market Steem, not to end users but to developers of DApps. I have tried talking about Steem with people in the crypto space and most do not have a clue as to what is going on. Steem is the one chain with the most daily active users of every chain out there. There are projects with tens of times higher market caps but that have almost no actual real world use. You wouldn't believe how badly informed many crypto investors out there are. The same goes for developers. So far, there has been little to no marketing of Steem to the most relevant target audience. It's a high time to start doing that.
There's little point in marketing Steem to end users. Steem is meant to be the infrastructure layer of an ecosystem of decentralized apps. It involves a steep learning curve. It's way too complex for average people. Marketing to end users should be left to DApps. They are best equipped to handle onboarding themselves because they can each tailor their approach to their specific target audience. What Steemit Inc should be concerned with is building the infrastructure and marketing the platform to app developers. Steem has the unique advantages of being fast and free as in not having any transfer fees for users nor DApps. All marketing to developers should be done coordinated with the team building Steem-Engine.
Eli Powell has done a good job slashing costs, generating revenue and from what I can tell, managing Steemit Inc in general. But what I see as a potential risk is focusing on steemit.com too much. In the grand scheme of things, Steemit the blogging app should be a relatively minor part of the road map to the wider adoption and growth of the ecosystem. It's a good tool to squeeze some necessary ad revenue from right now. But Steemit Inc should not lose focus of the long-term objective, which is attracting a large number of DApp developers and ultimately the mass adoption of Steem through DApps using it. The mass adoption of Steem may come about in completely unexpected ways. It is impossible to predict every creative and novel way to leverage the blockchain, of which there will be a large number if the platform is to take off in a big way. It would in the best interests of Steemit Inc as well to not lose focus of that objective because they still own over a half of the stake.