Greetings Steemians,
as you might know, we recently announced that we're going to start manually curating posts on Steem.
We've been curating for a few days now and even added a custom comment yesterday that we're posting under each curated post, so users know that the author didn't just buy the vote, but was actively selected for curation. (Later today, we will release a post, where the curated posts will be shown and where we'll publish our curation ethos)
So far, it's been very refreshing to support the community directly as well as people bringing value to Steem, by using proof-of-brain to give out rewards.
We're planning to focus mainly on curation with the Steempower we have currently been delegated to by delegators.
This, of course, creates a problem with lower payouts (possibly even none, with 100% curation) since we're not powering down and sharing the curation rewards.
The reason we ultimately decided against the route of powering down and sharing the curation rewards, is not because we just want to profit from it, not at all. It is primarily because managing the accounting for crypto is already complicated and adding curation rewards sharing with 13 weeks powerdown is a bit too much for the current situation.
This might change over time, as we've got more time on our hands after the re-release of Smartsteem.com. But what's the alternative until then?
What are SmartPoints?
SmartPoints is a token (not a SE token) that is going to be distributed at 3 PM UTC every day to delegators, (distribution will also be published to Steem blockchain for transparency) at a rate of delegated_steempower / 1000. Example: Bob delegates 10,000 Steempower to 
10 SmartPoints daily.
These SmartPoints will not be tradeable at first (might be in the future) but instead will function and can be redeemed in different ways.
We're currently redoing Smartsteem.com completely and this will also include new tools & services, which will be fuelled by SmartPoints.
The goal with Smartsteem was it always to build something with revenue, that can function as a fundament to bootstrap other projects.
So far, this has been a great success and we're planning on implementing SmartPoints to be redeemed for other goods on these new projects, where you can then benefit from being an early adaptor of these projects and a supporter of Smartsteem.
Those are the two main ways we plan on giving value to SmartPoints, but more will most likely be added over time. Of course, we're not able to guarantee that SmartPoints are definitely going to have a value. But we love blockchain technology way too much to stop with Smartsteem. Again, this is an incubator for many great things to come and we hope you'll join us.
We're going to keep you updated on changes and should have implemented the display of SmartPoints on Smartsteem.com later today.
Last but not least, we want to thank everyone for the positive response on our recent changes and we hope that you're seeing how sincere we are about changing our business model for #NewSteem.
Sincerely,
Team Smartsteem
PS: The first distribution of SmartPoints happens today!
