Steemit, a blockchain powered social media platform, celebrated July 4 by distributing digital currency payouts worth approximately $1.3 million, or 10% of Steem’s current market cap, to its user base.

Half of the $1.3 million supply of Steem was handed out in Steem Dollars – a form of Steem worth roughly one US dollar, and half in Steem Power – a vesting currency that supercharges voting power on the platform. Early adopters and major contributors were rewarded for creating and improving a thriving, collaborative community of members interested in everything from gardening to politics to financial markets.

Steemit CEO Ned Scott said the distribution over the holiday weekend was the first of its kind in the cryptocurrency world and marked a pivotal moment for Steemit.

“This was an opportunity for us to thank our growing community, to reward them for building a sustainable ecosystem that’s much more than the sum of its parts”, Scott said. “From every corner, users have been drawn to Steemit because the system actually rewards thoughtful comments, unlike Reddit or Twitter. The community and the blockchain together power a system that gets better and better every day.”

The payout follows the platform’s beta launch in May. After recording a 1600% growth in its user base from May to June, Steemit doubled again in the month from June to July.  In the 24 hours proceeding the payout, Steem’s volume doubled to $26 million. In the same time period, website traffic doubled, with votes per day increasing from 4680 to 8350, posts per day increasing from 1200 to 2300 and new account sign-ups tripling. With rising interest in the cryptocurrency, Steem trading volume peaked at an all-time high. 

The open source and transparent nature of the Steem blockchain technology prevents any form of censorship, and it allows third party entrepreneurs to easily build powerful applications off it, like steemle.com (user tracking charts) and steemd.com (category specific threads).

“Attempts at censorship can be proven by anyone with a blockchain explorer or another front-end application built on the Steem, so users can feel free to post how they really feel. This freedom is what empowers the Steemit community, and it’s one of the major ways we’re different from centralized, controlling and manipulative social media networks,” said Scott. 

Steemit engineers continue to add new features to the platform on a regular basis. Plans are already underway to create an embeddable Steemit button that can be posted on blogs throughout the internet, allowing authors to post their articles and their fan’s comments to the blockchain and giving them eligibility for cryptocurrency rewards.

“In a year from now, there will be many bloggers using the platform to monetize their content without using advertisements. By the time we get there, we’d like to be much further along in our development of side chain plugins too, which will allow Steem to support a decentralized app-store, similar in appearance to Facebook or Google’s, but based on decentralized, provably-fair technologies and new business models,” added Scott.