STEEM is Facing a Critically Dangerous Phase
Top Witnesses and Their Alarming Beliefs
Recently, I’ve become deeply concerned after hearing statements from some of the Top Witnesses.
A few of them have openly claimed that a portion of the 5 million SBD in the STEEM DAO belongs to them, which is truly shocking.
The STEEM DAO is a public fund meant for the growth of the STEEM blockchain ecosystem.
It should be used for developer support, community growth, infrastructure improvement, and other collective initiatives.
However, these individuals believe they deserve that funding simply because they've been running nodes for years.
This is a dangerous and distorted sense of entitlement, and it clearly shows how STEEM is still stuck in a centralized mindset.
STEEM Actively Repels Developers
After years of conversation and interaction with various Witnesses, I’ve reached one conclusion:
On STEEM, time, effort, and personal financial investment are not respected at all.
Our team has invested over 1.5 million STEEM, developing and maintaining a wide range of dApps, automation bots, DeFi, and blockchain-based games.
Most recently, we have been developing a P2E service, investing heavily in development and marketing.
To fund this, we had no choice but to sell some of our STEEM holdings.
Yet the reaction we received was:
- "A traitor who sold STEEM and left"
- "A greedy person obsessed with money"
- "A trash developer who only sees STEEM as a profit tool"
Yes, we sold STEEM—but that was to create new services that benefit the STEEM ecosystem.
None of that effort is recognized.
In this ecosystem, whether you sold STEEM or not is the only standard by which people are judged.
This binary mindset has made STEEM a fundamentally hostile environment for developers.
The Misjudgment Toward Cryptid Hunter
We launched Cryptid Hunter, which had seen success on the TON blockchain, on STEEM to contribute to its ecosystem.
On TON, we were awarded the NEST Lv3 designation and recognized as official ecosystem partners.
We were invited and attended meetups in Korea and China, and even received an invitation to an event in Dubai (though we couldn’t attend due to scheduling).
On STEEM, the experience was completely different.
After spending just a few minutes in the game, some people clicked a few buttons, noticed a couple of bugs, and immediately concluded it was a "trash game."
What’s worse is that they didn’t even try core gameplay features like:
- Card upgrading
- Deck building
- Card opening
- Energy charging
- Dungeon system
- Inventory management
- Card fusion
- Airdrop system
They didn't test a single core feature.
Based on shallow interaction, they gave lazy and unfair assessments, and because they didn’t actually play the game,
they kept asking ridiculous, baseless questions that made no sense in the context of the game.
I was even asked, “Did you sell STEEM to buy NOVA?”
Anyone who has actually played Cryptid Hunter even once would know this is a completely nonsensical question.
These individuals lack experience with P2E systems and have no understanding of blockchain-based game structures.
It is shocking to see such people making bold judgments about a game they’ve never properly played.
And the fact that such a person is one of STEEM’s Top Witnesses says everything about the current state of this ecosystem.
Cryptid TCG Will Likely Not Support STEEM
I’m now seriously considering this:
Cryptid TCG is unlikely to use or support the STEEM blockchain.
Cryptid TCG is one of our team’s flagship projects, developed over a long period of time.
It is a full-featured trading card game with illustrated cards, balanced gameplay logic, and a Web3-based economy.
But what have we received from the STEEM ecosystem?
Not respect, but mockery.
Not feedback, but baseless criticism.
Not support, but hostility.
In such an environment, why would we even consider launching this service on STEEM?
Unless STEEM changes drastically, Cryptid TCG will very likely not be part of this ecosystem.
In Closing
There’s still much more I’d like to say, but I’ll stop here for now.
I sincerely want STEEM to change. I still hope for its improvement.
But at this rate, STEEM will be remembered not as an open ecosystem, but as an isolated island—
a frog trapped in a well that refuses to look beyond.
If real change doesn’t come, then we will have no choice but to walk away.