Introduction
Most of us, who is in cryptocurrency (blockchain technology) for a while, know about TheDAO project and its story.
The DAO had an objective to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing and crowdfunding projects. It was instantiated on the Ethereum blockchain, and had no board of directors. The DAO was crowdfunded via a token sale in May 2016. It set the record for the largest crowdfunding campaign in history. In this post, I will put my general thoughts on that.
How Steem and TheDAO is similar...
What got most blockchain enthusiast excited about TheDAO (DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is that it was attempting to utilize wisdom of crowd to fund projects, was very hugely hyped and marketed. Even though some was skeptical about TheDAO project, I am sure they still invested in it.
Note that, Steem was already announced at that time and was being actively developed, but many like myself missed it. In my case, it is because, 2016 was one heck of a year for crypto projects and year of ICO (rise and fall). From the end of 2015 and first half of 2016, we have seen dozen projects doing ICO (initial coin offering) and it was that easy to scam people with making just graphics and using buzz words and post it on bitcointalk forum. In annoyance of ICOs and scam projects I have made habit of checking projects less frequent from 2016 hence missed Steem 😑.
Right after I found out about Steem and learned social (and many more features) aspect of the project, I got hooked on technology and future potential. Fast forward, here we are today with more than 120,000 users, active engagement and growing community.
Steem is already successful because it is already utilizing wisdom of crowd and crowdfunding at least 1000 projects/posts daily.
Steem not only doing that, it is taking that further by having all functionalities in-one blockchain. Steem is Augur, TheDAO, AKASHA, etc. Every Ethereum Dapps can just easily be implemented on Steem and it is that easy as well. You don't have to think about solving gas problem, or wait when network gets stable, network without spam attacks, etc. etc. Current state of Ethereum somewhat halting many projects that rely on network stability and scalability. Steem is constantly evolving because it has real userbase and community/crowd wisdom/collective intelligence to do so. Technology behind Steem (Graphene and Chainbase) which allow us to interact with blockchain near real-time (3 secs) is one of many features that makes it stand out from all other projects/platforms.
Mainstream adoption
Most crypto projects, not only struggle to keep interest (of investors and its users) on their projects to continue development but they also struggle to get mass adoption. Here is why...
Are you familiar with well known Gartner Hype Cycle?!
Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.
Trough of Disillusionment is the part where projects struggle and disappear or never recover.
I also believe that we have multiple cycles of this in each new projects or technology. And if you map them into bigger cycle one can argue that they never reach Peak of Inflated Expectations. Because, lack of development and community involvement, collective intelligence on it...
What will be the case with Steem then?
I think, future of Steem is bright, so far wisdom of crowd taking project right directions, at least we will find out 😊 and that same collective intelligence gets evolved over time with more people joining in. You might argue crowd don't have much to say where the Platform is moving, well, you are wrong. When crowd has any stake and deeply involved in daily decision making, then their collective intelligence can help to further advancement of the Platform.
These projects, one of the fascinating and amazing experiments of our life time.
In conclusion, Steem on and enjoy the evolution!