APX is Live! 📸 The Holy Grail of the Steem ecosystem has finally arrived: After ...

... exactly 107 weeks since the official announcement, we are able to use the amazing @appics mobile application and actually earn the native APX token, that was promised a span of 750 days ago. In Gematria, a branch of Kabbalah, 107 equals "Holy Grail" in the English cipher, fitting for the first ever announced Smart Media Token. The span of 750 days equals "In the blink of an eye" in the mystical Jewish Gematria cipher and even though the wait was long, from the perspective of the now, it indeed felt like merely a blink ago.

APX is now a Steem Engine token, as Steemit has not been able to deliver on their promise yet, even though SMTs were announced shortly BEFORE Appics. It should be mentioned that SMTs are now in their Beta phase. However, I appreciate that the Appics team has decided to run with Steem Engine for now, which has been widely adopted by the Steem community. This will allow all of us to access and trade the tokens on the already established platform from the @steemmonsters aka Splinterlands creators, who have been pushing the entire blockchain through the valley of the crypto winter.

The Appics app is out for over a year now and is basically a clone of Instagram. Since they didn't have their own token until today, it has been seen rather skeptical by some Steemians, who don't like to see large Steem payouts for merely a photo. I hope this will change now, as the main earning source for Appics users will now switch to the APX token. It works just like Steem or any Steem tribe, like PAL, LEO or SPT and has its own inflation pool with voting power, if you have APX staked in your account. This is huge: Instagram is one of the most popular apps among the younger generation, who wouldn't touch Facebook - or Steemit! And rightfully so, as images are speaking louder than any written word ever could. Appics looks gorgeous and has a team of amazing people behind it, who are equally brilliant and beautiful minds. There is not a single project in the world that I trust more than this one, since I have met the team in person. These young people are ready to change the world. And I am ready to follow them all the way. Are you?