Steem Price Today – Live STEEM Chart

About Steem

Steem is a community-focused blockchain launched in March 2016 that powers social media and content platforms through incentivized rewards. Built by Ned Scott and Daniel Larimer (the creator of BitShares and later EOS) under the company Steemit Inc., it was one of the first blockchains designed specifically for social applications rather than pure financial transactions.

Users earn STEEM tokens by creating and upvoting high-quality content across the ecosystem, with rewards funded by token inflation rather than advertising revenue. The flagship application, Steemit.com, launched alongside the chain and quickly became one of the most-used dApps in crypto during the 2017 bull cycle, spawning a wave of related platforms such as DTube (video), DSound (audio), Busy, and Splinterlands (blockchain gaming), which later migrated to its own chain.

Steem uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus model with 21 active witnesses producing blocks, enabling three-second block times and fee-less transactions for end users — a critical feature for social media scale. The project experienced a major governance controversy in early 2020 when Justin Sun (founder of Tron) acquired Steemit Inc. and, in coordination with several major exchanges, used customer-deposited STEEM to vote in new witnesses, overriding the existing community.

This event triggered a hard fork led by long-standing community members, creating the Hive blockchain as a direct fork of Steem's state at block 41,818,752, with most core developers, dApps, and active users migrating to Hive. Steem continued to operate under new leadership aligned with the Tron/Steemit Inc. camp, and in 2021 STEEM tokens were integrated more closely with the Tron ecosystem, including airdrops and cross-chain support.

Today the Steem ecosystem is significantly smaller than at its 2017-2018 peak, but it still maintains active witnesses, a functioning reward pool, and a core group of content-focused dApps. STEEM remains listed on major exchanges including Binance, Upbit, HTX, and others, and the chain continues to process content transactions daily. The three-token model — STEEM (liquid), Steem Power (staked influence), and Steem Dollars or SBD (a USD-pegged token) — remains one of the more ambitious experiments in aligning content incentives with token economics, and the project's history is frequently cited in discussions about blockchain governance, exchange custody risk, and the challenges of decentralized social media.

How the network works

• Content Monetization Engine: Steem's reward pool distributes newly minted STEEM to authors and curators based on stake-weighted upvotes, allowing users to earn cryptocurrency directly for posts, comments, and curation activity. Unlike ad-supported platforms, creator income comes from protocol-level inflation rather than third-party advertisers.
• Fee-less DPoS Throughput: The chain uses Delegated Proof of Stake with 21 elected witnesses producing 3-second blocks, enabling high transaction throughput suitable for social media workloads. Users pay no direct transaction fees; bandwidth is instead allocated proportionally based on Steem Power holdings.
• Three-Token Economy: Steem operates with STEEM (the liquid, tradable token), Steem Power (staked STEEM that grants voting influence and rewards), and Steem Dollars (SBD, a token designed to track approximately one US dollar in value). This separation lets users hold speculative, governance, or stable positions within one native system.
• Built-in On-Chain Social Data: All posts, comments, votes, and follows are stored directly on the Steem blockchain rather than in off-chain databases, making content portable and censorship-resistant at the protocol layer. Multiple independent front-ends can read the same underlying social graph.
• Stake-Weighted Governance: Holders of Steem Power vote directly for the 21 witnesses who produce blocks and set chain parameters, giving stakeholders real on-chain influence over protocol upgrades. This model delivers fast governance decisions but also concentrates power in large holders, as demonstrated during the 2020 Steem/Hive split.

What Steem can be used for

• Creator Rewards on Social dApps: Bloggers, photographers, and commentators post content on Steemit-style front-ends and earn STEEM and SBD when their work receives upvotes within the seven-day reward window. This creates a direct, transparent alternative to ad-revenue-sharing models used by Web2 platforms.
• Decentralized Application Hosting: Developers build social, publishing, and community dApps on top of Steem's account system and on-chain storage, reusing the existing user base and reputation graph. Historical examples include video platforms, podcast sites, and community forums that share authentication with the base chain.
• Fee-Free Micro-Transactions: Because transfers cost no gas fees, STEEM and SBD can be used for tipping, small donations, and reward distributions that would be uneconomical on fee-based chains. Communities use this for contests, bounties, and peer-to-peer support.
• On-Chain Community Governance: DAO-style communities use Steem Power voting to elect witnesses, fund proposals through the Steem Proposal System (SPS), and steer chain-level decisions. Stake delegation further allows larger holders to empower active curators without transferring ownership.
• USD-Denominated Payments with SBD: Steem Dollars provide a relatively stable unit of account inside the ecosystem for pricing services, paying freelancers, or settling bounties without volatility exposure to STEEM itself. Though the peg is imperfect and depends on witness-set feed prices, SBD remains in active use for in-ecosystem commerce.

STEEM supply and issuance

Supply model

STEEM has an inflationary issuance model rather than a fixed economic supply cap. A declining issuance rate does not mean that new issuance eventually becomes zero.

Liquid and vested balances

Steem Power is calculated from vesting shares, called VESTS, and differs from a transferable STEEM balance. Power down converts vested holdings into liquid STEEM over time; current amounts require current network data.

Token roles

STEEM supports transfers and can be powered up into Steem Power for platform influence. SBD is a separate dollar-referenced asset; its market value and conversion rules should not be confused with holding cash.

Issuance schedule

The documented HF16 schedule starts at 9.5% annual inflation and falls by 0.01 percentage point per 250,000 blocks to a 0.95% floor. This is a block-based schedule, not a fixed 0.5% annual reduction or a quoted current rate.

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