Can STEEM navigate through the rough times ahead?

It feels like I'm thinking about the future of STEEM on a daily basis and question if this will really be a big thing, or if it will eventually just become 'another' alt cryptocurrency?

I know there are plenty of people still bullish on STEEM and the future on SMT's but it doesn't translate into real world applications in my humble opinion.

STEEM and the Steem applications are still acting like faucets, and not actually building something people are talking about outside of this Steem-Bubble.

And certainly we don't see a lot of movement in the crypto online news as STEEM certainly appears to have lost it's buzz.

I really believed in the SMT model until a few months back, but the 'Coming Soon' message is wearing a bit thin.

STEEM has lost the first mover advantage, by taking so long to deliver this smart token and without any announcements of major deals with existing sites, I feel SMT's will come and go rather quickly.

Sure we might see an influx of shitty ICO's trying to scam money from unsuspecting customers, but we'll need more than that if the STEEM token becomes on object of desire.

And the fact that we couldn't sustain a reasonable price during the Bitcoin crash, also suggests we don't have enough buy support for our token.

However, the one thing STEEM does have is a community and a number of projects that use STEEM. But as we can see this doesn't normally translate into success, as most projects can't raise the necessary SP to power the projects.

I guess the thought is they will have to buy STEEM and hence raise the price, but we are talking low budget, small team projects, and not silicon valley VC funded projects here.

Only, time will tell if SMT's will save STEEM or if after a small surge in price, it resumes it's downward trend.

I certainly hope it can recover, because it has massive upside if it get's picked up by an established website looking to reward it's users with smart tokens.

But for this to happen we first need SMT's to be released and a huge marketing campaign by Steem Inc to get some decent media attention.

Because it doesn't matter how good we think STEEM is, it'll fail if nobody knows about it.

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