Anyone that attended Steemfest 1 was given 1900STEEM ($190 at the time) as a present for attending. This was in November of 2016. A little over a year ago. Everyone that kept that STEEM would now be sitting on $5000 worth of STEEM. It's the best example of Return on Investment on STEEM that I can give. It's just incredible. But more interesting things happened to the Steem blockchain in 2017. # The Experiment ------- In the beginning of 2017, there was an experiment conducted by two whales to countervote other whale votes. Ultimately leading to more voting power to minnows. My upvote (with 15K Steempower) went from 1 cent to 8 cents. That experiment made me invest more in STEEM [here](https://steemit.com/life/@exyle/loving-the-experiment-bought-more-steem). # HF18, arbitrary reward splitting and the explosion of development. -------- Arbitrary reward splitting made it possible for developers to monetize the Steem blockchain by being able to reward themselves with an X percentage of your earning through using their application or front end. This happened 9 months ago. I wrote about it [here](https://steemit.com/life/@exyle/earn-money-with-any-app-you-build-on-steem-wow) back then. We saw an explosion of development. Dtube, Dmania, Esteem, Dsound and many others benefit from this feature every day. Dtube, for instance, gets 25% of the reward of this post. Which I think is perfectly fine for the service they provide and they can use it to make the platform even better. # The popularity of Blockchain shows that scaling is extremely important. --------------- With the rise of crypto in 2017, it has become clear that not every blockchain is able to scale well. Bitcoin saw a massive influx of transactions and can't handle the amount. Leading to a huge backlog of transactions and high fees. The Steem blockchain has no problem with this. And is already doing more than 3 times the amount of Bitcoin transaction per day. It's handling 1.1 million transactions a day with 0.10% load on the network. # SMT's (Smart Media Tokens) ----------- The announcement of SMT's came sort of out of the blue and it took me a while to wrap my head around it. Now I think it's one of the coolest things we can expect for 2018 for the Steem blockchain. Tokenizing and therefore being able to reward content and communities in new ways will change the internet. I recommend reading and listening to [this post](https://steemit.com/money/@andrarchy/cryptoeconomics-a-brief-discussion) from @andrarchy if you want to understand more about it. # Happy New Year ------ 2017 has been a crazy year full of awesome stuff that I can only see continuing in 2018. I wish you all a happy new year! ------- https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://steemitimages.com/DQmf84t6h3Ds3PRaKvNgnSgL9WZuWzphjXhBKJDfpGDun4g/Exyle%20logo%20final%20_%20RGB-04.png ------------- #### I am a witness with our developer group @blockbrothers for the Steem blockchain. If you want to support us I would appreciate your vote [here](https://steemit.com/~witnesses). #### We build Steemify a notification app for your Steemit account for iOS. Get it Here:

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