It has been almost 3 months since @BlockRush last posted to Steem and its obvious lots of things has happened in the Blockchain and crypto-currency industries since.
In this report we will highlight the state of the three most important Blockchain spaces. As usual, we will be honest, not sweet.
The Bitcoin space
Bitcoin and her sister Ethereum seem to be trapped in the game of cash flow. Investors are not investing for their value but only on speculation. Developers have also become so complacent that no one really cares any more.
Recently BitPay's developers added a new payment feature which they claim will be more secure: payment protocol. Unfortunately, its not supported by many wallet which means they are only reducing the accessibility of Bitcoins.
We tried to make a Bitcoin deposit to Namecheap to buy a domain for one of our projects, and sure we couldn't because BitPay will not give us a simple Bitcoin payment address(our wallet did not support the "new payment protocol") despite the $11+ in transaction fees.
How innovative is that? Its been months after SegWit and we are still waiting for the Lightning Network.
The Cryptocurrency space
After a boom and burn in the mad rush crypto-currency race(which is still on), all eyes are now on Telegram. It seem that "investors" only invest into ICOs only to cash out and invest into another one.
There hasn't been any major development, no major government activity, no major corporate activity and no major mass activity.
Despite all the seeming progress, from the view of those not into crypto, the industry is still at the stand still. And we are still waiting for the Smart Media Tokens.
The Steem space
Lack of growth
Despite the fact that Steem does really fulfill all of its promises of being a platform to reward content, instant fee-less transactions, and Blockchain based content store, it still has not found any use outside of Steemit.com.
The recent spike in the price of Steem is not even a reflection of the appreciation of the value of Steem, it is only an inflation caused by the anticipation in the launch of Smart Media Tokens.
We originally detailed three smart ways of opening up Steem before launching the Smart Media Tokens for obvious reasons, however it seemed no one took notice.
Perhaps the only thing working well on Steem is @Utopian-io, yet after the Smart Media Token launch and Utopian's own tokens, Steem could loose traction just like BitShares - since everyone is busy with their own Smart Media Tokens.
Internal scuffle
As if all the signals pointing to Steem's current challenges were not enough, we still have internal scuffles and self appointed guardians.
It is now that some users such as @brandonfrye are learning about it the heard way.
The voter cult!
While whales such as @anyx complain about the double spending problem on Steem, @berniesanders laments about the greedy-like attitude of @haejin - the voter cult still reigns supreme thanks to @steemvoter.
No one is talking about that, just as no one has yet seen three months activity of Youtube content bot @[crypto**]. @grandpooba has summarized the State of Steem:
What's cooking?
Peer Query
For us, the past three months has been all but ambition, compromise and innovation. Our journey on Steem has not been what we had initially planned it to be, yet we have gone far than we could have envisioned.
After playing with the Steem API for a while, we came up with a query client for Steem: PeerQuery.com. While we did not succeed in building what we had intended(full client), yet we ended up with something more profound: a specialized tag client.
Peer Query v2 is a query client which display posts with category tagged as pq-question, pq-proposals, pq-contest, pq-quiz and pq-gig. Currently all queries are displayed a post, however we will soon add advanced interfacing and features to suit each type of query.
Within the next few days, we will be releasing the @PeerQuery client. My personal account is @dzivenu and that is where I intend to publish the introductory report.
The Steem Institute
@PeerQuery is just a tip of the iceberg; there is more. We working on our biggest Steem project: @Institute. The Steem Institute will be an establishment to further the development, accessibility and adoption of Steem.
It will provide a variety of specialized Steem clients, apps, services, community and support for Steem's users, investors, developers and entrepreneurs.
We will unveil the Steem Institute by the end of this month. Despite everything has has happened, this year will be a very exciting time for Steem. You can bet on that!
If you appreciate our work, please consider supporting us by upvoting and resteeming this post. Any support will be much appreciated.
Oh, and we need a little loan of a dozens of steem for one of our projects. If you are interested please contact us on discord.