Hardfork 21

Hello Steemians, we have been hard at work adding the changes to Hardfork 21 necessary to add a long term funding mechanism to the Steem Proposal System (a/k/a SteemDAO) as well as the Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP). We are happy to announce that we have completed that work and released the code for Hardfork 21 so that public testing may commence.

Testnet

The testnet will hardfork this Thursday at 1pm EDT. At that time, witnesses and developers will be able to begin testing all of the changes included in this release. This will have no impact on regular Steem users on sites like steemit.com.

SMTs

Now that the release candidate for HF21 is out, our blockchain team has turned their attention to continuing development of the Smart Media Tokens protocol!

Rewards API

One of the additions to HF21 involves the Rewards Curve which is used to determine how much Steem a given post should receive from the Rewards Pool based on the votes it has earned and the stake (i.e. Steem Power) backing those votes. The release candidate changes the curve from a linear curve to what a convergent linear curve. @vandeberg (Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit) explained the convergent linear curve in this post.

In order to demonstrate the effects of the proposed changes, we created a Rewards API which enables us to simulate the rewards payout with different curves and parameters. We are also releasing this API to the public so that anyone can use it to approximate payouts on the chain at any particular time.

The above chart demonstrates 3 different constants fed into the convergent linear rewards curve and their effects on comment payouts. As shown in the charts, 2e12 approaches our current linear rewards at roughly 16 STEEM, which is why we feel it will provide a meaningful and balanced change to Steem’s economic distribution.

Communities

@roadscape is working on Communities. There are two aspects to Communities: 1. the backend work in Hivemind, and 2. the frontend work on steemit.com (Social Condenser). For the backend work, he has been working with community members to develop a Hivemind-based protocol specification that meets the needs of as many Steem developers as possible, not just Steemit Inc. For the frontend work, he has begun the process of combing through the user interface assets that were already developed, evaluating whether the code is still useful, and looking for those components which are reusable across approaches.

Financial Report

Our Managing Director, @elipowell, is currently preparing a financial report that will provide some transparency into our costs (primarily AWS costs) and the revenue we have been able to generate through advertising, so be sure to follow her account (@elipowell) if you’re interested in gaining deeper insight into how Steemit Inc. is operating as a company.

The Steemit Team