Promoting Steem to the Asian Markets - Could Steem-Pop be a thing?
Today I was discussing with a few stakeholders and witnesses about listing Steem on some exchanges, these are some of the motivations that I laid out as to why it is important to get Steem widely listed:
Paycent.com - STEEM > Debit card - making it easy for the masses to use Steem and makes for easier onboarding
Exodus.io - Advertising, more touch-points where STEEM is visible, reputation by brand association and gateway to Trezor hardware wallet integration.
Other Exchanges - Although STEEM is listed on big-name exchanges it doesn't hurt to have backups, extra touch-points for advertising, but mostly to prepare for SMT’s, an SMT likely can’t afford to list on Bittrex or Binance even if Steem is integrated, listing Steem on cheaper exchanges like Daybit, Gdax, Sistemkoin etc give SMT’s affordable options.
One of the big hurdles I am facing is that Steem exchange nodes are complicated for exchanges to set up and likely still require too much server resources since MIRA is not yet recommended for exchanges, the documentation likely needs to be improved. An exchange-node-in-a-box would be awesome, tagging @someguy123 :)
Regarding Exodus, I am in touch with their COO via email, who is very enthusiastic about listing Steem but can only do so if Steem is listed with their exchange partners Changelly, Shapeshift or Coinswitch and was given their contact details to open up dialogue. The problem is that most require 20K listing/liquidity fees and the SPS can't fund that yet, nor do I think such funding would be approved. There is a light at the end of the tunnel though, provided by @acidyo, the MVP of the day as far as I am concerned, his suggestion was to approach @blocktrades about them becoming Exodus integration partners, Dan Notestein was fairly interested in the idea and will be in touch with me in a week or so when he is less busy, for an introduction to the Exodus COO via email. (I am awarding @acidyo 30% beneficiary on this post for his suggestion)
@scipio was another valuable person today, he offered support for the Exodus listing and brought it to our attention that STEEM is currently listed with a EUR pair on https://bitvavo.com/ (@bitvavo on Steem), I looked on https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/#markets and noticed that it does not show there yet, likely because Bitvavo is not yet showing data on CMC. But this led me to an interesting discovery.
55% of our 24-hour volume is from Korea on the KRW pair!!
@scipio will also be getting 30% beneficiary rewards from this post for helping with this discovery.
Embracing K-Pop and Asian Pop-Culture on Steem
So, how's this for an idea. We can already see that the Asian cultures have an affinity for Steem, very likely aided by the fact that they can digest Korean content on Steem on Tribes frontends like https://www.steemcoinpan.com/, so I say we need more of these Tribes UI's. What about one called KPOP or one dedicated to Hello Kitty or Kawaii (cute) culture?
Psy is Korean and was a huge hit worldwide with his song Gungnam Style and is now a well-known household name even in the West, there are likely many more Asian-pop culture influencers and artists that are recognised in the West, for example, my daughter listens to BTS and which is a big hit with the juniours in her school. Maybe the key to Steem penetrating the Western markets is to first enter via the East?
I offer this as an idea for anyone out there who speaks an Asian language and could drive such a movement, don't forget the Japanese culture as well, at some point a fair percentage of traffic to Steemit.com was from Japan.
Listing on Asian Exchanges
Listing on Asian exchanges is key to making Steem more accessible to their population, I'm going to look into Daybit and also would love to see Steem listed on Kraken, I however, battled to get a contact to engage with to discuss listing Steem on Kraken. I would be very grateful if anyone could provide me a way to contact someone directly at Kraken.
Tl:Dr
Ok so if you didn't read the above or just skimmed it, the key takeaways are:
1- List Steem in smaller exchanges so SMT's can have cheaper alternatives to list their coins on and be able to list on CMC (which requires 2 x exchange listings)
2- Promote Steem to the Asian market with targetted Tribes communities for various aspects of their Pop-Culture
3- List Steem on Asian exchanges to make Steem more accessible to the Asian population.
4- If you have direct contacts at Asian exchanges please forward me their details, especially Kraken, also Bithumb's Steem wallet is current disabled so if anyone has contacts there it would be appreciated.
5- @scipio and @acidyo are each 30% beneficiaries to this post for their discussion contribution that led to the ideas laid out above.
Cheers for now,
Ricardo Ferreira
@thecryprodrive
BuildTeam CEO
Steem Consensus Witness
If you like what I do, vote for @thecryptodrive witness with this vote link: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Or use the quick SteemConnect link: https://app.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=thecryptodrive&approve=1
Some of the volume is fake, so be aware of that.
But I like your ideas for increasing visibility and tradeability of STEEM. Thanks for taking this one into your own hands. I think you are the right person for this because of your many business contacts.
Even if half of that volume is fake, it still is more than any other exchange. Thanks for your encouragement I do appreciate that, I only wish I had some funding to get Steem listed, only so far I can go with free listings.
You can get the funding through SPS. It will not be easy, but if the community decides that we want Steem on a specific exchange and is willing to pay the price tag, then somebody like you should receive the funding in escrow until the listing can be paid in full.
You could start with a smaller exchange and work your way up to the bigger ones after the first few new listings...
Hey, yeah it is a good idea in theory and the SPS is meant to demonstrate the will of the people, but the reality is the community is fragmented and dispersed so unless we can get all eyes on the proposals and get everyone to vote in unison there is no way the community will have a voice greater than the few whales that are currently gatekeepers of the SPS. See my response to @dtrade above.
@thecryptodrive, Small scale Exchanges can play very strengthening role and will help in spread the reach of Steem as you said. First of all i want to appreciate your continous efforts which really adding so much value for sure. Keep up the good work and stay blessed.
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Yes I agree, small exchanges will have more of an impact on SMT's who need a cheap place to list. Stay blessed as well and thanks for the kind words.
Good to read your words and thank you so much. Have a pleasant time ahead.
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HitBTC transfer is also disabled for eons. Interestingly, HitBTC sometimes have highest volume among the exchanges with similar price range to other exchange. It is strange since exchange with disabled transfer always has price disparity.
I wonder why Okcoin (OKEX) and Bitfinex do not list Steem. They have many, many junk or low ranked coins.
Wow interesting regarding HitBTC, they likely are still down due to the hard forks.
I agree Steem should be listed on Okcoin and Bitfinex, they prob want listing fees and the Steem community doesn’t have a budget for that.
HitBTC is down for more than a year.
SPS for listing Steem in exchanges would be interesting. A witness can take initiative to contact and quote, then propose a SPS. Once granted, witness can guide and pay the exchange to add Steem.
In my previous post I had quite a bad experience just trying to get a small $200 proposal over the line trying to reward a dev who did some good work. The SPS unfortunately hasn't got much funds as it still needs to fill up and will take a few months, also it demonstrated to me just how centralised the SPS voting is, which basically relies on a handful of whales to have the time and inclination to vote for it enough to get it over the refund proposal so it can be funded.
Some stakeholders have also expressed their disinterest in private chat for funding exchange listings, I was sadly left feeling a bit disillusioned with the SPS and currently share the same fears some of the general public has about it becoming a boys club for whales, devs and witnesses, even non-dev witnesses are discriminated against participating it seems.
I see your point, but the SPS is only a few days old. This is by no means the end stage of it.
Imagine what it will be like in 2 years when everyone is used to it being funding good projects...
I would make the listing proposal with yearlong funding with the promise to repay overfunding. It is still worth the try in my opinion. It may take a few months to get the funding but I think we will get the funding if we give it a few months time.
It's hard for everyone to think about the endstage of technology, this SPS is still a toddler... of course, the current state is a little disillusioning.
But that it would depend heavily on whale votes was clear from the beginning when we knew it would be stake weighted. It think that's not a bad thing, it just needs time to gather momentum for some good proposals.
Thanks for the perspective, you are correct, it is just teething problems for now. I guess we need to give it time, and great idea regarding putting in a proposal over a long period of time.
I think the Kawaii Token would be a good idea, dedicated to Asian pop culture ( kpop , jpop, manga, kawii goods, Gyalu, antohter market I thinbk would attract a tun of people globally is a tribe for modified cars.
PS* Didn't realize steem was so difficult to integrate with exchanges.
Yeah Steem is difficult from the exchange node perspective is pretty much different to any other chain, alot of tokens are bitcoin or dash forks which are easier, exchange techs are generally stumped when it comes to Steem and the node RAM requirement is at least 64 GB, so if they don’t have sufficient volume it is hard for them to justify it, hence the listing fees.
Can you tell me what Gyalu is? Maybe share some links on it, I really hope someone runs with this idea of Asian pop culture for a ui. My brother is actually into modified JDM cars, his blog is @nelkeljdm.
Funny I was noticing the exact same thing earlier about Korea and was thinking about Korean Steemians helping promote this platform to others in their country.
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It is happening to an extent, one of our witnesses @clayop is quite deeply involved with Korean outreach.
With the amount of Steem on exchanges in general I am surprised that others have not looked into its listing but the node issue is an interesting one considering some of the downtime we have seen.
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Downtime, complexity and cost are all factors yeah.
If most of our buying are coming from korea, then er aldo need to focus on or around the asia sides
Yes exactly what I am suggesting.
Just tell them SCT is pumping great and they will all flock to ya.
👍
~Smartsteem Curation Team
Interesting how half of the top sites are Asian: