Hey guys, something just happened that hasn't happened yet to my knowledge. We passed 1M on steem-peg. That means we have 1M steem stored on the exchange. That's a major deal to me! We've spent months growing this thing and people continue to use it. Thanks to everyone in the community that have played a part in this, thank you to the tribes, and thank you to the loose federation of devs working together on this project to make Steem a place where asset classes can be exchanged, business can be formed, and communities can come together..
Roadmap
So, we're behind where I wanted to be. We've been working on a slick new Dex, but it's taking a while to implement. This shit is hard and no one on the team works on this full time. It's an opensource project and while we're growing we're still very much in our infancy.
When talking about the Roadmap I'd ask you to understand a distinction. Steem-engine.com is a front end. It's a website to conveniently view the backend graphically. The backend is the Steem Smart Contract node developed by Harpagon.
Steem Engine gets some criticism for being Centralized. The steem-engine.com front end is 100% centralized. I own it. I'm a cruel little dictator. I don't let people put up scams, and I do let things I think are a bad investment stay up. You'll have to live with that or not use the service. The backend is separate from steem-engine.com and managed by harpagon via opensource code on github where people can run nodes to verify everything that happens on it.
Backend- Decentralizening
The Steem Smart Contract Platform is managed by Harpagon and it's separate but obviously underlies steem-engine.com as the backend. He also operates the steem-peg system. The front end has no separate backend for the trading platform than the smart contract platform. That's it!
There's not one place you can go that will give us a 100% definitive answer of what is a DEX. Is steem-engine.com and the smart contract platform perfectly decentralized? Not quite, but that's something that we're planning on fixing.
(small legal note, from the point of view of the US, this is just my non-lawyer understanding, but they are looking at "decentralized" as the answer to the litmus test of "can owners change the balances?" I, aggroed, owner of the steem engine corp can not change it. I don't operate the server, nor do I have keys to it. My understanding is that is the central piece the US system looks for in their determination of "is it a dex?" Thus my attornies are confidant the answer is yes to the government even if some harsh critics on steem don'e believe it meets their definition. Of the two, the opinion and guns of the US government keep me up later at night than the random critics)
A key thing that's missing are more nodes. There is currently only one node that steem-engine.com is pulling from. That's not the end of the world because all the data is verified by Steem Witnesses on the Steem blockchain and anyone can run a node to see we're acting honestly, but it sure would be better if there were other nodes and the people operating them were all incentivized to witness blocks. Well, that's what we're doing. It's modeled after Steem, so it should be really familiar to people. We'll have a rotating set of witnesses that help assemble our chain. We expect our testnet to be up shortly after HF21 is implemented (end of August).
Steem Smart Contract Witnesses will run the code for a month or so until harpagon et al is content it's working smoothly and then we'll make it live. So, hopefully sometime around when the 4th quarter starts we'll be a lot more decentralized, and can meet the definition of DEX for both the US Govt and internet trolls concerned users.
Front End- Making shit better
As I mentioned before we're a few weeks behind schedule. I knew we needed more automation, but we also need a new Dex that's more modern than the one we started with. @beggars is the lead dev of the site, and I asked him to stop working on business automation and instead work on the dex, but during that time he had a lot of family things come up and it really slowed down progress.
Now that we're behind I asked him to go back and work on automation. What I mean by that is that we need all the Tribe stuff to have easy forms, be clear what the options do, and pay the independent devs that run the various parts automatically. So, hopefully we'll see a lot more of that shortly.
Some of this work is happening now, so the STO page is down, but should be back up shortly.
Vision
Steem-Engine.com is meant to be a place where you can easily trade one asset class for any other. To facilitate that we have to get people here, so we have the Tribes feature as a way to gather people by common interest, unite them by common financial ties, and then give all the collective people the ability to trade things without friction.
While I'm an avid anarchist I have to admint that we live in a world where beurocrats are willing to commit violence and theft against we the people. US Law rrequires things that the general crypto community would consider an invasion of privacy such as giving up your personal details.
So, the plan for the site is to make steem-engine.com have more than one layer to it. On the first layer is a pseudoanonymous exchange. On the second layer will live a KYC/Accredited exchange. The second layer will allow people that are interested to provide your private information (stuff that's on your passport) to us to allow us to meet US standards for "Know Your Customer" laws. We also hope to facilitate IEOs, ICOS, and STOs. Many of these will very likely require knowledge of whether or not you're an accredited investor. Accredited is bascially a substitute for financially well off. So, we'll ask you to supply some financial data about yourself too. If you do those things you'll get access to a separate website that will allow you to trade things like restricted securities, and participate in investment rounds if eligible or accepted.
In order to facilitate the IEOs we'll be working over time at making steem-engine have a kickstart-esque feel where projects can come, make a page, describe what they are doing, and launch. We'll charge a fee for this service and be co-investors in these projects.
A main reason for making steem-eninge is knowing that if you can aggregate money somewhere one can setup a business, and since I want businesses and communities to come to Steem it's been imperative to get a means to aggregate capital here.
Airdrop
One feature that had problems was the Airdrop. We had a few difficulties. Sorry for your troubles if you had them. I asked @beggars to take it down. It wasn't his main focus and it was causing a lot of distraction and headache keeping him away from his main focus of getting the site up and running.
I contracted with @ali-h who in very short order got a sweet little system up and running. We can make lists, make airdrops, and run claimdrops. The process for the few people that have already used the service said it was smooth and easy.
We'll be charging 250 ENG for a list, 250 ENG to prep a drop. If it's an aidrop it'll cost 50 ENG/1000 users. If it's a claimdrop we'll charge your users 1 steem to get their drop. They'll send se-dropship a memo and we'll send them the token.
NFTs
NFT work is coming along. I hope the initial implementation is done in August. We'll have to see, but I suspect that we'll have this thing up and running soon and likely not later than the start of the fourth quarter (oct 1).
Anyway, cruising the best I can with the best intentions of growing this thing as large as possible. 1M steem is a major accomplishment and many kudos to all involved! Thanks for supporting this project and we look forward to bringing more people, services, tokens, and businesses to the Steem-Ecosystem!
aggroed