What is the progress that has been made during this year?

@pmartynov: First of all we’ve formed a team of 10+ amazing devs and product people and that are pushing Steepshot forward every day.

Together we’ve built web and mobile clients that were highly evaluated by Steem users and robust backend infrastructure with real-time blockchain synchronization that our clients are currently using.

Also we’ve created Ditch.NET, a secure open-source library that Steepshot mobile clients are using. It perfectly serves as an intermediary between the app and the blockchain and helps to create, serialize, sign and broadcast transactions to Steem and it’s forks.

We’ve got everything that we need to continue moving forward.

What are the difficulties in the development process that you’ve encountered?

@pmartynov:

1) IPFS is not OK for decentralized social apps as a primary content storage.

IPFS never guarantees you that the image is going to be received by the end user that requested the photo. Also based on our tests it may take up to 20 minutes to fetch a photo by its hash through IPFS, while the upper bound we can allow ourselves for robust user experience is a few seconds.

We plan to continue using centralized cloud as our primary storage, but we want to use IPFS as a secondary storage that could be addressed if there's something wrong with a user image in our centralized storage.

2) Dealing with plagiarism, spam, untagged adult content is critical for our platform.

We’ve published the rules of our community and do not tolerate their violation. We’ve also started working on automatic adult and plagiarism detection that will help us make the process automatic.

3) Lack of libraries

There are limited number of programming libraries for Steem blockchain and you need to build your own in case there’s no suitable existing lib for your programming language.

How do you plan to popularize the project? Are you going to hold an ICO?

@pmartynov: Unfortunately, 95% of ICOs now are all about marketing and no product. After receiving money during an ICO developers start to build their product, that's the best case. In the worst case the project just stops its evolution. We’ve decided to choose another strategy. Build the product first and prove that we can deliver something before running any ICO.

At the same time we realize that we might need a larger budget for a faster scaling so I guess there will be more info published regarding fundraising next year.

We’re closely watching the SMT initiative from Steemit team, but waiting for the actual code in production before making any SMT-related decisions.

Also we are constantly improving our community management and participated in a few public events. We’re reachable on a daily basis in our Telegram and Discord channels, so feel free to join.

Tell us about the team that is working on the project

@pmartynov: We have a very balanced team: experienced developers, analyst / produсt owner. We recently took a business development manager and a product development expert.

Launching a social project is a responsible and difficult task and expertise very important. This is a supercompetitive sphere, and only a few become really massive. It's easy to make a mistake that will be fatal.

Who are your users?

@pmartynov: Our community is more than 1200 MAU now. Users from 50 different countries makt more than 700 posts daily through Steepshot. Most of our users came from Steemit.com. More that 20% of users continue making posts 30 days after they make their first post.

What plans do you have for 2018?

@pmartynov: We’ll keep working on improving our platform and introducing a lot of new in-app features. Our goal is to build a network for friends, so we plan to expand beyond the current Steem community. We’ll use all the existing tools to bring more people to Steepshot and Steem and to make Steepshot economy even more fair.

By the way, I’d like to thank all our users for their activity on Steepshot and for their words of support. Let’s make Steepshot even better in 2018 together!