Dear Steemians,

Steemit, Inc. is currently undergoing a structural reorganization which I believe is important to share with the community. Steemit Inc., is a private company that runs the open-source steemit.com, a decentralized app on the Steem blockchain. Steemit Inc., also uses some of its resources and engineers to contribute code updates to the Steem blockchain. In addition, we provide APIs to third party developers at our own expense to help grow the developer ecosystem.

Given the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes, we have been forced to layoff close to 70% of the team. The remainder of the team is staying on to focus primarily on reducing the costs of the infrastructure running steemit.com and our public APIs, and ensuring that the community can remain informed of developments.

We have conducted our first all-hands meeting and are prioritizing all the cost reduction solutions we can accomplish in the near term, including replacing steemd plugins with hivemind, pitchforking Steem to prune the chain state size from 160gb to 0gb, AWS usage projections, DevOps solutions, reduction of Staging and Testing nodes, and eliminating redundancies.

We still believe that Steem can be by far the best, and lowest cost, blockchain protocol for applications and that the improvements that will result from this new direction will make it far better for application sustainability. However, in order to ensure that we can continue to improve Steem, we need to first get costs under control to remain economically sustainable. There’s nothing that I want more now than to survive, to keep steemit.com operating, and keep the mission alive, to make great communities.

There are two reasons I’m in cryptocurrency: first, I came in because I believed in the potential of cryptocurrency to give us greater freedom through unrestricted value transfer, value store and all the financial tools that come along with that, which can empower us like few technological innovations have. The second reason I stay in cryptocurrency, is because it has the potential to spawn the next killer application that can rival the Instagrams and Reddits of the world, and that fuels the mission to make great communities, which need unrestricted access to financial tools.

Over the last many months, along with a hyper-talented team, I have gone back to the drawing board and figured out the remaining challenges that are acting as barriers in the way of that killer application and making great communities. In that time we have created many assets that will help us accomplish this mission. Over the next several weeks, despite our course for bringing these products to the world being changed, I hope to share the assets we have created with you, including showing you how their success would be a benefit to Steem and cryptocurrency in general.

I would like to thank all of our employees and contractors for their months and years of dedication and hard work. It is incredibly difficult to part with these great people who I have gotten to know well and respect. I am deeply grateful to the many contributions to our mission. In order to minimize the impact on these people, we are doing as much as we can to smooth their employment transitions. Everyone who has assisted us are outstanding individuals that any organization would be lucky to have.

Best regards,

Ned Scott
Founder and CEO of Steemit, Inc