This post will briefly present the Steem Business Alliance (SBA) project currently being worked on jointly by 
As emphasized to a greater extent later in the post, we want to be as transparent as possible with the community and make the most of your ideas and feedback in order to achieve our mission:
Working collectively to attract and build value-adding sustainable businesses on the Steem blockchain.
We are therefore excited to be sharing this first blog post with you!
The idea of forming a Steem Businesses Alliance took place during Steemfest 3 in Krakow November 2018. There, our overall takeaway from the talks was that the future of Steem is one primarily centered around the creation of applications and businesses utilizing the blockchain. Considering this vision for Steem, as well as the current state of the blockchain, we agreed that it made sense for us to establish a more tangible form of collaboration to jointly build and share resources, establish and share best practices, as well as joining forces to promote Steem and attract new users, developers businesses and investors.
Following a meeting of 
The SBA will be an organisation for any registered businesses involved in for-profit, sustainable use of the Steem blockchain. It will be a community-driven strategic alliance that shares resources, education and expertise while jointly developing best practice solutions for interested members to adopt. Once a rigid set of practices and a significant resource base is developed, the goal will be to attract new prospective clients and businesses to the Steem blockchain who may benefit from our joint experience.
Obviously, the main goal of the SBA is to achieve increased revenues for the members, while contributing positively to increase the value and utility of the STEEM token. The creation of the SBA is therefore motivated mostly by the shared understanding of its founders that by working collectively in this way, we can each benefit. Furthermore, we agree that all of our business can benefit from the individual success of other members. In particular, this would include helping each other succeed with regards to:
With all the members relying at least partially on the value of the STEEM token, we thus believe that if we can help each other successfully accomplish these goals independently, all members will benefit and the value of the SBA will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Finally, we observe that many tasks are currently carried out independently by different Steem projects with very little cross-coordination. This results in unnecessary repetition of work and expenditure of time and resources towards solving problems, or creating resources, which are simultaneously being worked on by other projects. The SBA will provide its members with a place to discuss ideas and identify synergies, coordinate efforts and thus reduce repeated work and increase development efficiency.
We currently have several ideas for the potential scope of the SBA in the long term. We also encourage everyone, especially other Steem-based businesses, to make suggestions as to what the final scope of the SBA ought to be.
Similar to how we believe that businesses on Steem can benefit from engaging with the community and make use of their feedback and ideas, so too can the Steem Business Alliance itself. Therefore, we intend to share as much detail as possible regarding our plans for what we intend to create, how we want to structure the organisation, as well as why we believe the result will benefit Steem. Throughout the process, we invite the whole community to provide ideas and feedback as well as diligently scrutinize our posts and statements in order to help us improve, hold us to account and ensure a positive outcome for the community.
One of the first concerns we have identified when discussing the consequences of a successfully established SBA is the risk of adding centralization to the blockchain. With one of the primary goals being exactly the opposite, to have a new organisation capable of funding and making blockchain development for the community, this is one thing we will try to avoid at all costs. While this concern will only be present in the long term once more members have joined and the combined stake of the SBA becomes significant, we want to discuss this early to ensure it is dealt with properly once relevant. The current agreement is that once the total stake of the SBA exceeds a certain amount (currently agreed as 15m SP) the members shall not run their own witnesses nor cast witness votes. We invite the community to present their opinions on the subject and how the SBA can contribute to increased decentralization of Steem rather than the opposite.
Again, we are eager to hear your thoughts on how we can ensure that the SBA adds value to Steem, and we look forward to sharing further updates with you soon!
