Developments on Steemit take place at a rapid pace, so I've applied a quick SWOT analysis to our platform for November 2016.
STRENGTHS:
Steemit has come on leaps and bounds this year, and the Steem cryptocurrency has found love and favour amongst a lot of faithful diehards (including myself!). @ned and @dantheman have developed a killer app here that sits abreast the Steem cryptocurrency, and this is one of its unique selling points (USPs).
The market cap for Steem hangs around $30M mark which is fairly good for a Beta phase crypto-coin, and we regularly hang around 10th - 12th spot on the crypto market caps. The account totals are around 110,000; compare this with Bitcoin: 7 million user wallets on blockchain.info alone.
All the data looks good for Steemit, however, there are obstacles ahead.
WEAKNESSES:
I can't hide my feeling on this. Getting market penetration for Steemit beyond the crypto-community is going to be tough. We seem to have hit a wall of users around the 100,000 mark.
The other question is, do we have the scalabilty to become the next Facebook or Twitter?
In the mean time this means that any rival like Golos can come in and try to undermine any existing Steemit users if they feel the platform is not moving forward quickly enough. We need to get users 'sticky' to Steemit and stay here! ... take it away big Norwegian Steemit dude!
It also begs the question, could another alt-coin enter the crypto-coin market cap and overtake Steemit?
We also need to be aware if Steem does become successful that no hard fork schisms start up like it has for Bitcoin Classic and Ethereum Classic. This does creates uncertainty for would be investors.
OPPORTUNITIES:
The big opportunity here lies in the Steemit blockchain technology. Most projects on here are just scratching the surface with experimentations of small proof of concepts. There is a whole world of possibilities for the Steemit blockchain technology to have impacts on small businesses, governments and even industries themselves.
Another opportunity is to take Steemit out into the non-crypto world so people like our family could use it on a daily basis. I think this is one of the hardest tasks facing Steemit, as it still appears to be a very niche crypto-coin experience within a social media setting at the moment.
THREATS:
As far as threats, you only really need to look to see if there are any top #20 players in the crypto market cap space at:
Synereo was the only other competitor in the top #20, but it has since fell back to #34 at the time of writing this article.
Yours.network seem to be taking forever and a day to launch, so this plays well into the hands Steemit.
Regulatory pressure may be something Steemit may feel in the longer term if this platform really takes off, as when local currencies come under threat, government don't tend to like it and regulate heavily.
Thanks for reading folks. I truly believe that Steemit has the power to turn the tide with the blockchain, so please be the best ambassador for Steemit you can possibly be and leave any of your comments below.
