Through hosting the State of Steem Forums and through editing the SoS Daily News digests I get pretty engrossed into what is happening on Steem.
The last three months has been a period of significant change on the Steem platform.
Major new projects are bursting to the surface. The governance of the platform is in a positive state of change.
2019 is going to be a big year for Steem.
To measure if this big year will become a great year, I am watching closely 12 indicator projects that for me will determine the State of Steem.
Here are projects 1 to 6. The remaining half dozen will follow in part 2...
1. Hivemind
This was one of the first major development milestones from Steemit Inc this year.
Hivemind was released in beta for in mid January and is already providing significant memory reductions for full API nodes. It is understood that there may still be some more optimisations to be done to further reduce memory requirements.
2. RocksDB
RocksDB and MIRA are the next stage in Steemit Inc's developments to reduce the memory requirements for running node servers. The implementation of Rocks DB and MIRA is particularly for witness node servers.
Steemit Inc's lead blockchain developer Michael Vandeberg @vandeberg stated in an interview on MSP Waves last week that the work is now entering its final testing phase. They are targeting memory requirement reductions down to 4 - 8 GB for witness nodes.
3. Smart Media Tokens
The proposal for Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) was first put forward by Steemit Inc over a year ago.
Other developments, and more recently the major staff reductions, have caused major delays for SMTs.
Although significant work has already been done pre staff reductions it is understood that SMTs, even in a somewhat cut-down first iteration, are still a few months away. Steemit Inc are due to release a revised timeline for their SMTs soon.
In the meantime community developers have gone ahead with building their own token variants.
Developer @harpagon along with Steem Monsters founders @yabapmatt and @aggroed have just in the last couple of days released Steem Engine, a smart contracts side-chain platform that provides for the creation of custom tokens.
Other developers including @fulltimegeek, @shredz and @dlux-io (@disregardfiat &&@markegiles) have also been working on token related projects.
4. Communities
Communities are considered to be one of the vital components in strengthening the social network offering of Steem.
The initial concepts for steem communities were put forward by Steemit Inc around a year ago.
Although Hivemind, which will power the Communities feature, has now been released, it is understood from recent interviews with Steemit Inc Executive Chair Ned Scott and Managing Director Elizabeth Powell that Communities on Steem are still some months away. It is hoped that Steemit Inc will be able to make available a timescale for Communities soon.
To fill the gap community developers have again stepped in.
Developer @shredz has recently announced that he has completed a MVP of a Communities feature on his Stratos DApp.
5. The Steem Alliance & The Steem Foundation
With the downsizing of Steemit Inc towards the end of 2018 it became clear that the Community would need to step forward and pick up the slack in a number of areas.
On a decentralised platform like Steem with no management or decision making processes in place it rapidly became clear that some new governance structure was needed.
Prompted in part by the critical intervention of the proposed Hardfork 21 Steemit Inc CEO at the time, Ned Scott revived an earlier idea to establish some form of Steem research foundation.
To start the process towards the selection and establishment of such a Steem Foundation, the Steem Alliance was set up and a Working Group elected.
That Working Group is now beginning the task of receiving proposals from the community for how a foundation could be structured. The proposals will then go out to some form of community voting.
6. Steem Worker Proposal System
Alongside the establishment of the Steem Alliance, a proposal has been forward by Dan Notestein from @blocktrades for a Worker Proposal System for Steem to distribute funding for projects on the blockchain.
Although the proposal still needs some refinements it has received generally positive feedback from the community.
Ned Scott is a strong supporter of the proposal and discussed it at length with Dan Notestein in an interview last week on MSP Waves.
The exact timescale for the establishment of the Worker Proposal System is not yet known, but it is thought that it will be within the next few months.
These are the first six of my key indicator projects for the State of Steem.
I will reveal the other half dozen in part 2 of this post.
In the meantime, what are the projects you are most closely watching to determine how Steem will fare this year...?
[ penguin image from unsplash.com ]