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Steem Monsters is but one application the Steem blockchain and the upcoming Hive and SMT's will be enable developers to create. I think @taskmaster4450 is right when he emphasizes the importance of building the technical foundation of Steem before mass onboarding or worrying about user retention or anything like that.

SteemMonsters will be storing Custom JSON data only on the blockchain, not posts, comments or messages. It will operate outside the reward pool. Of course, it can use it, but it doesn't have to. How about 100-500 popular apps using Steem as a decentralized data layer and a money system used be a total of 200 million users? With precious few of those even knowing about the social media side of Steem.

Yes. The infrastructure is much more important at this stage. This is also why it is the best time to focus resources on community builders of the future.

And yeah, the future is not bad if we make it ;)