The most important reason why smartphones became so successful is that they allow connections with anyone and everything in the world around them. Their sensors, their continuous internet connection, their touchscreen, cellular networks, the built in GPS, gyroscope and cameras allow developers to build amazing apps that combine data from all of these sources. Thus giving users access to a mind-blowing amount of apps that solve real world problems, apps smartphone users have grown to love.

Byteball is an application platform too and has a similar challenge of building connections with the outside world. The protocol already has the basic mechanisms for building these connections: oracles, witnesses, attestations, and now they should be filled with useful content.

We already have real name attestation, email attestation, accredited investor attestation, and now, to provide even richer identity layer to apps, we are introducing Steem attestation.

Steem attestation allows over 1 million Steem users to link their Steem username to their Byteball address. The attestation record will be stored in Byteball DAG and will be easily available to apps. There are two fields in the attestation record and both have practical uses:

Steem username. It allows Bytes and other Byteball-issued tokens to be sent to steem/username instead of a less user-friendly crypto address (upgrade to wallet version 2.4 is required). We already have this feature from email attestation, but unlike email, there are no concerns about being exposed to spam by making one’s Steem username public (it is already public anyway).

Steem reputation. It is the most valuable information we get from Steem. High reputation is hard to obtain and it indicates social weight of the user. Applications will be able to provide privileges to users with high Steem reputation.

There are 3 bots that already use Steem reputation on launch date:

The real name attestation bot offers a 30% discount to users with Steem reputation over 50;

The “Buy Bytes with Visa or Mastercard” bot offers a 3% bonus of the purchased amount to users with Steem reputation over 50;

The ICO bot includes an option to offer various levels of discounts depending on Steem reputation. It is up to individual ICOs to enable this option.

The Steem attestation bot is already available in the Bot Store.

Rewards for Steem users

When you prove your Steem username, you will also receive a reward based on your Steem reputation and for referring other users. The higher your reputation the bigger the reward.

The attestation rewards are as follows. Note that these rates are likely to change in the future, especially the starting reward at a reputation of 30 which is not too difficult to achieve:

Steem reputation above 30: you get a $10 reward

Steem reputation above 40: you get a $20 reward

Steem reputation above 50: you get a $40 reward

Steem reputation above 60: you get a $80 reward

Steem reputation above 70: you get a $160 reward

(The rates changed since the launch, please talk to the bot to learn the current rates.)

All rewards are paid in Bytes from the undistributed funds.

Your reward is split 50/50 between cash and a smart contract. This means that 50% of the reward is spendable immediately after attestation. The other 50% is paid to a smart contract that can be unlocked after one year. Once this time period is reached you will be able to withdraw the remaining 50% of the reward.

The referral reward depends on the reputation of the referred user, not the referring one and the reward for referring is split 75% to a smart contract and 25% immediately.

Why is Byteball doing this?

We want to engage large communities and bring crypto adoption to the masses through ease of use and applications that are only possible on crypto platforms. We hope that Steem’s huge community of content producers will help achieve this goal.

To our knowledge, this is the very first time that Steem and its huge community is going to become an airdrop platform.

Unfamiliar with Steem?

Steem is a blogging and social networking platform, and steemit.com is its most well known website. Other popular frontends are busy.org, Utopian, and eSteem.

The websites use the Steem blockchain whose main tokens are Steem and Steem Dollars. These are are tradable tokens obtained for posting, discovering, commenting and curating content.

Steem allows people to earn cryptocurrency without needing to buy it first in exchange for fiat currency.

Despite only being launched in March 2016 the network already has more than 1 million users.

You can read our announcement about the Steem integration on Steemit.

The Byteball team greatly admires the significant real world traction that Steem has achieved in such a short period of time. It is fair to say it is one of the few crypto projects that has managed to achieve significant real world traction.

We are determined to do for smart contracts and commerce what Steem has made significant strides in doing for online publishing: mass crypto adoption.