Many people remarked there are so many things happening now around Steem that is hard to keep track of them.
Even more so if we think of it in terms of a month long. But I'll give it a try, to see how much I can remember...
From reducing the costs of running full nodes and in the future of witness nodes too, to Steem Alliance and the 'worker proposal system' for Steem, offered to be implemented by Blocktrades.
Costs of running a full node have already been reduced and, as I read in Steemit blog, more work is put in further reducing them. At the same time, new developments on the RocksDB side is expected to reduce the size of witness nodes, once completed. Both are important steps for making Steem more decentralized and its nodes keepers more immune to harsh market conditions.
Steem Alliance was just going through the initial step of voting a working group.
I don't know if there are any more news referring to @blocktrades offer for implementing a worker proposal system.
And then, we appear to have a more clear division of responsibilities at the top of Steemit, Inc. And much more communication from both Ned and Elizabeth Powell. They seemed very open, even regarding their total stake in STEEM, the number of employees and the number and names of board members. The issue that remains as a huge question mark for me is the continuous power down and the reason they provided for it.
Also during this period there was an initiative to create a Dolphin Council and users who agreed with its constitution (and are at least dolphins) became founding members.
On the outside the ecosystem, we also have a number of positive news and developments that involve Steem.
A very good article I've also mentioned yesterday, which focuses on dApps in general, talks about Steem in favorable (which really means fair) terms, mentioning among other things, that 44% of its STEEM holders use their tokens on dApps, compared to 27% on EOS and 2% on Etherium.
Steem and its dApps have been added to a few more websites that track dApps stats for the entire crypto space. I think the latest was dapp.com. We consistently show that we have some of the most used dApps in the crypto world.
Not so long ago STEEM has been added as a payment option on the general-purpose e-commerce website price-breaker.com, as we found out from @theycallmedan in this post.
We also discovered that 70 out of 3800 businesses which use coinpayments.net as a payment method, include STEEM and/or SBD in their list of supported coins. @pennsif has a great initiative in three steps, to
- Encourage the 70 vendors already taking STEEM to keep accepting it
- Encourage the other 3700+ vendors not already taking STEEM to start accepting it
- Encourage other online stores that don't take cryptos to use CoinPayments.net (and take STEEM/SBD)
First step is under way. Take a look, and more importantly, take action if you can!
And finally, one article crossed my eyes on my feed today. If you live in Caracas, Venezuela, you can relax at Mukti Spa and pay with STEEM or SBD. With all the tension, you might need that...
We haven't got yet feedback from @bittrex, as far as I know, if STEEM will have its own USD pair on Bittrex exchange or not. A positive outcome on that front would round up nicely the month of January for Steem, I think.