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Hive Engine and Smart Media Tokens

Hive-Engine is the token layer that Hive actually uses, and Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) are the token layer Steemit announced and the ecosystem waited years for. They are not the same thing, and an earlier revision of this page said they were — it described SMTs as "a key feature of the Hive-Engine ecosystem" and called CURE an SMT. Both statements were wrong, and the correction is the most useful thing on this page, because the gap between the promised layer and the built one is why this whole side of the ecosystem exists.

The short version: a Graphene chain will not run your code. That one architectural fact — see the Matrix — forces tokens to live somewhere else, and the story below is the ecosystem working out where.

1. Why STEEM made tokens

The reason was reach. STEEM was not reaching everyone, and tokens were felt to be the thing that could relieve that.

That is the motive, and it is easy to lose behind the architecture. STEEM had one chain, one reward pool and one audience. A person who would never post to a general social site might well post to a site about their own subject — fishing, music, a language, a country, a game — and STEEM had no way to be that site for them. Tokens were the answer to the audience problem: give every community its own token with its own reward pool and its own front end, and each one brings in the people STEEM by itself was never going to reach. Growth by multiplying the number of doors rather than by advertising the one door harder.

That is the same argument this project later made about DeFi — that a financial layer reaching "really nobody" needs an income source and a low cost of entry before it reaches regular people. See The Ponzi Test: Outside Revenue and the Down Line §3.

The architecture then decided where those tokens could live. Steem, Hive, Blurt and MELEK are Graphene chains, with a fixed operation set — `comment`, `vote`, `transfer`, `delegate_vesting_shares` and a few dozen others — and no general-purpose virtual machine on layer one. You cannot deploy a contract to it. That is a deliberate trade: it is why a post or a vote is a cheap fixed operation and why the chain is feeless, with bandwidth rationed by staked Resource Credits rather than auctioned as gas.

So the motive and the constraint pull in different directions, and that tension is this whole page. The ecosystem wanted many tokens to reach many audiences; the chain could not hold them. Either the protocol had to grow a token layer of its own — which is what Smart Media Tokens were supposed to be — or the tokens had to live beside the chain, which is what actually happened. Every token on this side of the ecosystem exists in that gap.

Where the two token models came from, and where the witnesses came from

The operator was reading both forums while this split formed, and his 2020 account of it is compact and worth quoting because it names the distinction that still organises this wiki: "Bitshares had Assets and Ethereum had Tokens."

On the Bitshares side, an Asset was "not mined but created and owned by the creator, to then be distributed like stocks, or coupons, or tickets" — issued rather than earned, and then traded on OpenLedger like any other market. That is the User-Issued Asset, and it is the direct ancestor of every engine token described on this page; see Token Buybacks, Market Fees, and the UIA Lineage.

Two further details from the same account matter for understanding why this ecosystem is shaped the way it is:

And the consequence, when Steemit Inc. changed hands: the witnesses functioned as a board of directors that the buyer had not accounted for. "When Ned sold Steemit INC it started a War with the Witnesses and eventually they forked Steemit... This Platform and Currency are called HIVE. So now there are basically 2 Steemits." That fork is why the token layer this page describes ended up on Hive rather than Steem, and why §3 below ends the way it does.

2. Smart Media Tokens — the protocol answer that arrived too late

Steemit Inc.'s answer was to put tokens into the protocol. Smart Media Tokens were announced in 2017 with a whitepaper and sustained promotion: each community would get its own token with its own reward pool, running natively on Steem.

What actually happened was delay. Steemit published a schedule for a January 2019 testnet and a 24 March 2019 mainnet release, then posted an update on 11 March 2019 delaying SMTs to focus on MIRA (a memory-reduction project), and later said it was not ready to give a specific timeline at all.[1] A later Steemit press release in 2019 was headlined "Steemit Releases Smart Media Tokens" and described SMTs as having been live on testnet for over 40 days.[2]

Treat the final status carefully: the promotion outran the delivery by years, the Justin Sun acquisition and the Hive fork then reorganised the whole ecosystem, and no significant token economy ever ran on SMTs. What matters for this wiki is the part that is unambiguous — the tokens people actually used were never SMTs.

3. Steem-Engine — the community answer that shipped, and then died

While SMTs were being scheduled and rescheduled, Jesse Reich (@aggroed) and collaborators built Steem-Engine, launched 2019: a side-chain where anyone could mint a token and trade it, plus Scotbot, which gave a token its own reward pool and its own front-end tribe.

The launch post is explicit about the distinction this page exists to make: "Steem Engine Tokens are different than Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) currently being developed by Steemit, Inc."[3] It shipped because it did not need the chain's permission — it read ordinary Steem operations and interpreted them off-chain.

Then the March 2020 fork split the ecosystem, and the token layer went with Hive. Steem-side users who had held Steem custodially on Steem-Engine were airdropped Hive, and tribe owners had to rebuy BEE on Hive-Engine to rebuild their tokens — one estimate put a typical tribe at around 4,300 BEE.[4] The Steem side then decayed: outages, unresponsive support, ENG holders who felt written off.

Steem-Engine no longer exists. @aggroed announced its closure in March 2023 under the title "Steem Engine is Closing Down April 30th", and the Steem-side engine was terminated that April.[5][6] Anyone reading older documentation that treats steem-engine.net as live is reading history.

4. What the Hive-Engine system actually looks like

Hive-Engine is the surviving successor, and its design is worth understanding because MELEK-Engine is built on the same idea.

A caution on all of the above: the sourcing available is largely 2021-era community posts, and plans described then — such as moving tribe distribution off Scotbot and onto witness-run contracts — may or may not have been completed. Check current Hive-Engine channels before relying on any specific parameter.

5. Why this lineage matters to us

Read in order it is one story: BitShares UIA (2014) → Steem-Engine (2019) → Hive-Engine (2020) → MELEK-Engine (2026). Each step is the same problem — a chain that will not run your code — solved by bolting a token layer alongside it.

The UIA end of that lineage is where the token-management mechanics come from, including buybacks, market fees and fee pools; that is covered in Token Buybacks, Market Fees, and the UIA Lineage.

And one correction to carry forward: VKBT and CURE are engine tokens, not SMTs. Their peer group is other engine tokens, never the coins with their own chains. Putting a token's market cap next to a coin's is the category error the Matrix page exists to prevent.

6. Read next

Not investment advice

This page is history and architecture. It is not a claim about any token's value, not a prediction, and not a suggestion to buy or sell anything.

Sources

<ref>@marsresident, "Steemit: Under New Management" (Steemit, 27 September 2020) — the operator's firsthand account of Bitshares Assets versus Ethereum Tokens, Bitsharestalk as the ICO and witness source, Graphene, and the Justin Sun sale and Hive fork</ref>

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Coverage

Corrects an earlier revision that conflated SMTs with Hive-Engine tokens and called CURE an SMT. Covers why STEEM made tokens — the motive was reach, since one chain with one reward pool was not reaching everyone and per-community tokens multiply the doors — and why a Graphene chain's fixed op set then forced that token layer to live beside the chain, the SMT announcement-and-delay history, Steem-Engine's launch and its 2023 closure, Hive-Engine's architecture (sidechain reads, WORKERBEE witnesses, BEE fees, SCOT tribes, diesel pools), the Bitshares-Assets-versus-Ethereum-Tokens distinction and the Graphene/witness lineage in the operator's own 2020 words, and the UIA-to-MELEK-Engine lineage. Hive-Engine parameters are sourced from 2021-era community posts and flagged as possibly stale.

Videos

Watch videos about Hive Engine and Smart Media Tokens on YouTube ↗

Videos are found by the article's title on YouTube and are not reviewed or endorsed by the Library.

References

  1. https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/smts-release-dates
  2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/steemit-releases-smart-media-tokens-300967989.html
  3. https://hive.blog/steemengine/@aggroed/introducing-steem-engine-com
  4. https://hive.blog/hive-engine/@themarkymark/the-future-of-steem-engine-tribes-on-hive-engine
  5. https://peakd.com/steem-engine/@aggroed/steem-engine-is-closing-down-april-30th
  6. https://propol.is/wiki/Hive-Engine
  7. http://hiveblog.c0ff33a.uk/hive-engine/@aggroed/hive-engine-weekly-developers-meetings-aggressive-target-live-diesel-pools-by-friday

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