SMT Date Announced!..... But the Price of Steem is Unresponsive

A few days ago we finally got a date for the release of SMT's. The testnet is due to be launched on or by January 15th, 2019, with the mainnet due to launch just two months later on March 24th, 2019.

That's only almost exactly 5 months from now until the testnet launches!

And yet, the market remains unimpressed. In fact, by the sound of it in the comments for the post, you'd think the announcement was almost a bad thing. Perhaps naysayers and people wary of both the currency and the platform are the reason the market isn't responding the way many of us expected it would.

Of course, an announcement is very different from a completed product. I very much doubt that the market will remain ambivalent once SMT's are actually launched. Of course, they might. The Steem blockchain and Steemit platform (as well as the constantly growing list of other platforms built on Steem) have been quietly propagating and spreading in the background while people focus on currencies that are currently flashier and better known.

But they won't be able to ignore Steem much longer. When the SMT protocol goes live, it will be more accessible and just about universally better than the ERC20 protocol for Ethereum. Developers and major organizations will begin to notice this after the mainnet launches. I think the end of 2019 will look very different for Steemians than the end of this year.

Of course, all of this hedges on Steemit Inc. delivering on their promise, the witnesses being able to navigate the coming complexities (probably not the load of new users on the blockchain given Steem's stellar record, but I expect there will be other unexpected choices and challenges), and SMT's getting some major players interested relatively early.

It may work out and it may not, but one thing is for sure: to date, Steem is the best blockchain ~bet~ (calculated decision) out there. Hang in there folks. The real ride starts in January.