The Next Phase Of Steem: Reaching Out To Those Who Can Draw In More

Yesterday, I wrote this article about @steemonboarding. This is a wonderful project that seeks to onboard users to the Steem blockchain who are truly interested in contributing to the growth here.

I am very optimistic about the future of Steem. That does not mean that there are not challenges ahead of us. It does me we have to continue to keep making strides in an effort to really maximize the potential that exists here.

The entire industry is evolving before our eyes. We are looking at the situation where development is going to take things mainstream. At the end of the day, it all comes down to applications. Cryptocurrency will only be accepted when blockchain based applications attract the masses.

As I surf around the crypto/blockchain sphere, I come across some wonderful looking projects. They are well thought out and do serve a need in the world. The team involved seem solid with the experience to succeed in what they present.

The only thing that frustrates me is when I search out what blockchain they are on. It really can get irritating to see so many promising projects and find out they are using Ethereum. This is where most of the developers head. It is almost as if it is a default function for them.

Of course, Ethereum has a lot of name recognition among the development community. The ICO reputation also provides a benefit to this blockchain since the ERC20 protocol provides developers a route towards monetization.

We are also starting to see EOS pick up a lot of developers. Here again, we have a blockchain that gained a ton of recognition due to the year long ICO which raised $4B. Obviously, having that war chest along with the name recognition is going to attract a lot of attention.

Now I must say that both of these blockchains are general purpose, hence a bit different from Steem. Nevertheless, Ethereum has many issues with scaling that still are not worked out. When they get excited about the potential of 1200 T/sec, you know there are a lot of challenges with that blockchain.

Steem does not face this issue. The ability to handle a lot of traffic exists while also providing no direct fee transactions. Here again, we see a major drawback to the Ethereum blockchain. Many applications do not line up with having to pay gas fees.

EOS holds substantial promise yet it is not without it's own issues. We saw the run up in price of RAM after the blockchain started. There are also governance problems that arose almost immediately which still are not fully resolved. Certainly, we can attribute it to growing pains and should maintain confidence these issues will be worked out. I imagine this is the viewpoint those developing on there take.

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Which brings us to Steem: why are we not seeing more developers embracing the Steem blockchain?

I love the developers who are already operating on here. They are creating some terrific applications. However, while people focus upon the number of users, I feel one area we need to vastly improve is in the area of development. Whatever the number of developers, we need to see a 10X increase. If there are 5K developers, we need 50K; if 10K, we should seek 100K.

The bottom line is the only way that Steem is going to grow to big numbers is if the applications attract the masses.

At the end of the day, it is all going to come down to the apps that attract the attention. That is all the masses are concerned about.

Recently, Github was bought out by Microsoft. Anyone who knows about Old Softy, they tend to mess up anything they get involved in. This should raise alarm to anyone who is involved in development.

As I freely admit, I am not a developer and know little about the technical aspects of things. That said, I do know we have @utopian-io on here. This could be a very valuable resource to attract developers.

We need to be able to answer the question: why should developers choose the Steem blockchain?

At the same time, there needs to be outreach to these individuals. Once again, we saw a few people putting together outreach programs to attract users yet I have not seen any that target developers. It seems as if the approach is let them find us. The only challenge with that is there is stiff competition for these talents. The developers have options.

We need to stress the advantages of developing on the Steem blockchain. This is one move that could pay huge dividends all around.

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