I don't know what's smartsteem but you are sort of force to use you posting key to logon to steemit by default. For the wallet, they split and you need your active key to go in to claim your rewards and do the transfers you need. However, recently, with the changes including introduce the community function, the added a notification function and I found that allow you to claim without having to go the the wallet.

Have a look at the recent posts at:
https://steemit.com/@steemitblog

I did a bit of search, the couple of posts may help.

• https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/engineering-update-ddos-wallet-steemdao
• https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/social-condenser-is-live