I feel it could be something to do with those SMTs getting closer, as you briefly mentioned.
I saw a few articles on my Google news feed talking about steem having launched NFT tokens, but I haven't seen anything about that yet on steem itself...

My big thing that steem(&steemit Inc) needs to overcome is media hosting. Currently all non text media is offchain.... This isn't a blunder, it's fine to outsource blob data, but that shit needs to come onchain somehow, maybe with some IPFS magic or something, I don't know, haven't brainstormed that problem much. Hahaha. In any event ...

I liked the post. ^>