I wasn't aware of them shutting down 3rd party exchanges. humm, too bad.
However since Steemit is a new up & coming, and reputation based, perhaps this could be something negotiated at the Steemit executive level ? I did see Commercial banks in world, with reputations, so I could see Steemit in the new iteration Sansar, since sansar is promising to be quite a departure from SL and superior
as a friendly platform to build upon. Open in every sense of the word is what I get from the stuff I have read, and I agree that the VR stuff is not that prevalent and may never be until the prices come down and the resource intensity is dealt with. Sansar is largely built for every platform with VR being a large part but it's also supposed to manage the client/server better and more future proof than SL was, if you remember a lot of the C/S issues were baked into SL, and thus not able to be fixed other than building machines specific for SL.
They are going to learn from that lesson and build it far more adaptable and future-proof. Remains to be seen though how that shakes out... but it should be better than SL for PC based interaction.

I actually recently downloaded High Fidelity, anxious for Some sort of new virtual world.
PC only and just under their min hardware recommends, I could get in and navigate in the noob training room but after that couldn't do anything because I was lacking the VR hand controls, so that is not PC and totally VR which will limit it's growth in the space IMHO...

The Block-chain and it's speed could possibly manage the resource intensive graphics ?
I mean a LOT of GPU are really only to crunch the vast amount of data of modern graphics, so
in my reasoning building a graphical engine that is based on the block-chain processing could vastly speed up resolving to display !?! it may take someone familiar with both graphical game engines AND block-chain to flesh that out though, but I think it would be revolutionary !

In that vein, I also think that AI may take advantage of block-chain processing, As I understand things, as our graphics, algorithms, data sets get huge, this is where multiple cpu cores and multiple distributed computers working on PARTS of the calculations in parallel is required can speed things up. It will take a change in industry attitudes as 99% of even advanced software does NOT take advantage of even multiple cpu's on todays machines, so far it's only been academic exercises in distributed computing and only as proof of concept, such as the multiple GPU hard password crackers etc almost nothing in the real world even in the HUGE environment of drawing/design IE solidworks, can only do parts, it was NOT written for it you have to hack it to get it to send parts of tasks to other CPU's. even in a 12-24 CPU environment the processing is linear and not truly distributed. This is possibly where Block-chain could shine !
It think it will eventually, but it's going to take a paradigm change in thinking and education, after it's proven for specific tech like AI, banking, # crunching etc, we are only seeing baby steps currently, albeit important baby steps !