How Steemit powers crypto adoption in Africa

In the event you earned crypto for the primary time ever through the mid-2010’s, chances are high you made that cash creating posts on Steemit.

For a lot of Nigerians and Africans, crypto publishing apps like Steemit and Publish0x offered the gateway to entry crypto. Customers made cash by writing micro-blogs, grew their engagement and following, and earned cash from being high contributors on the platforms.

Platforms like Steemit and the much-changed Publish0x have been social finance (“SocialFi” in Web3 lingo) apps that allowed customers to monetise interactive actions. It was like utilizing Fb or Reddit, however in a approach that you simply have been paid for merely being on-line.

At its peak between 2017 and 2018, Steemit had over 100,000 Nigerian customers on its platform; in Africa, the quantity was barely extra. The SocialFi app claimed micro-bloggers may earn as much as $2.11 for a day’s work.

Nigerian customers took it significantly. Influencers on the platform and neighborhood leaders hosted bodily meet-ups in cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Uyo, and Port Harcourt to show others learn how to use the app. They shaped native assist teams to assist newcomers join, be taught the fundamentals, and develop their earnings.

All that hype from a number of years in the past has now died down. Customers, impatient with Steemit’s reward system, started leaving the platform. In latest occasions, there’s been little signal of platform upgrades or efforts to repair ongoing points.

Steemit and crypto’s early adoption

Based in 2016 by Ned Scott and Dan Larimer, Steemit was constructed as a social media platform on the Steem blockchain, owned by the identical firm. The Steem blockchain additionally has its digital token, $STEEM, at the moment priced at $0.1430. Exterior of the Steemit platform, folks hardly used $STEEM.

Individuals created posts—instructional, inspirational, topical, or the rest—and earned cash when others “upvoted” them. The extra upvotes (much like “likes” on Fb or Instagram) your posts obtained, the more cash you made—normally just a few $STEEM tokens. Throughout payout days, creators may then switch their earnings from their Steemit pockets, a built-in custodial pockets, to different crypto wallets like Belief Pockets.

This was earlier than crypto exchanges reminiscent of Quidax, Busha, Luno, and the likes exploded in reputation. So, to get different mainstream crypto cash like Bitcoin or Ether, Steemit bloggers needed to discover casual peer-to-peer (P2P) channels like WhatsApp teams, to search out whom to change their $STEEM tokens with. In the identical vein, they might additionally change $STEEM for fiat currencies like US {dollars} or Naira.

Steemit had a characteristic known as “Steem Energy”—a locked-up model of the token that gave customers extra voting energy. In the event you had extra of it, your upvotes carried extra weight and will assist creators earn extra. This meant that the folks with probably the most Steem Energy had a whole lot of affect on who received rewarded.

Steemit additionally rewarded folks for curating content material. This implies if you happen to upvoted good content material early sufficient, you earned part of the payout too. Customers additionally earned via feedback, particularly if their replies added worth to a submit or dialog. The extra useful your exercise on the platform, the extra doubtless you have been to earn one thing from it.

The platform ran a built-in reward cycle that took about seven days. So each submit had a couple of week to collect engagement earlier than it was evaluated for payout. All of this was tracked publicly on the blockchain, so folks may at all times examine the numbers for themselves.

Crackdown on engagement farming

Nevertheless, the kryptonite of most creator-centric platforms is human knowledge—and the way far individuals are keen to go along with that knowledge. As you might already suspect, Steemit customers noticed a solution to recreation the system. They might cluster themselves in small teams, known as “pods”, on Telegram or WhatsApp, and interact with each other’s posts.

This made it straightforward to cheat the system. Individuals would simply upvote their buddies’ posts to assist them earn extra. Over time, this led to poor-quality content material rising to the highest. The platform tried to cease it with “downvotes,” a approach for customers to name out low-value and spam posts. Creators caught doing this forfeited a good portion of their earnings.

In 2019, Steemit broadened its neighborhood guidelines in an additional bid to curtail low-value posts. Afterward, it additionally began taking motion towards customers who used AI instruments to generate content material, particularly when it was apparent the content material lacked originality or context.

To sort out the pod drawback, Steemit launched a popularity system, ranking customers on a scale of 1 to 100. The extra your popularity grew via beneficial posts and feedback, the extra weight your upvotes and downvotes carried. If a person with a excessive popularity upvoted your content material, you earned more cash than if somebody with a low popularity did. This discouraged folks from creating faux accounts or counting on new customers to recreation the system. 

However these strict measures got here with a worth. As the principles grew to become extra inflexible, some customers felt discouraged. Lots of them started migrating to Publish0x, which launched in 2019, and others moved to Hive, a spin-off platform, in hopes of accelerating their earnings.

Publish0x began as a social media and microblogging platform. Right now, Publish0x companions with survey suppliers to permit eligible customers, relying on their location and pursuits, to participate in surveys and earn credit. These credit can then be swapped for actual cash. Although nonetheless energetic, person exercise seems  to have dropped over time. 

Powering crypto adoption in rising markets 

Steemit claims it has now crossed over 1 million customers, and that 14.4% of them, as of June 2025, are Nigerians. Around the globe, 63.8% of its customers are from rising economies like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Thailand.

The corporate additionally says it paid out $59.6 million to creators in June 2025 alone and data over 1 million transactions each 24 hours on its blockchain, pointing to excessive demand and utilization.

In keeping with Semrush, a content material advertising platform, Steemit’s web site had about 2.2 million visits in June. On-line site visitors tracker, Similarweb, says 67% of these guests are males, whereas 33% are ladies.

Whereas there could now be over 140,000 Nigerian customers on Steemit, a beneficiant estimate will put energetic day by day customers—individuals who use Steemit app day by day—within the low hundreds. Many Steemit communities have gone quiet, and several other of the influencers who helped popularise the platform in Nigeria have since left.

But, some Nigerians, nonetheless energetic on Steemit, have managed to money out over $10,000 from their lifetime exercise on the app. For instance, Joseph (@josepha), a Nigerian Steemit person who was energetic 6 hours in the past, has earned $7,214.42 additional time; $165.72 within the final month, and $35.26 within the final week. TechCabal was in a position to confirm this on Steemit’s publicly accessible data area.

Ruth Joe (@ruthjoe), one other influential person, has earned $4,076.75, whereas Ngoenyi (@ngoenyi), one other influencer with 2,286 followers, has revamped $12,500 in lifetime rewards.

Steemit’s engine is now sputtering, nevertheless it hasn’t hit the brakes but. Devoted followers are nonetheless being profitable from the SocialFi app, typically changing it as their major hustle, or a aspect revenue. 

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