Steem needs a digital marketplace. This is another idea that sort of feels like a no brainer that we should have here on Steem. With the announcement of the @openseed project, it seems like it might be a good candidate for an application to be built there.

The Digital Marketplace

The service that I think resembles closest to what I think would be great for Steem is Gumroad. It's a content agnostic digital marketplace that allows you to sell whatever digital goods you want. You can set up a page, set prices, including free, and earn. It's really simple.

It's really popular among artists who sell things like process videos, Photoshop brushes, 3D models, Scripts and plugins, Digital Comics and artbooks, tutorials, etc. Gumroad takes a cut, everyone is happy.

I think we've got faucets more than covered here on Steem, we need more sinks and some are working on that, but something like this falls in the realm of a use case, which I think we also desperately need. Imagine you're in a writing Community, and you publish sections or drafts of a larger project as posts, then sell the final. If others are doing the same, you can use the Steem you earn to buy and support their products. Same with music, same with visual art, same with scripts and software. Something like this would be the next step in creating a real parallel economy here on Steem where the Steem goes full circle from being earned to being spent, to being earned to being spent without involving fiat at any point in the process.

The image above is from Artstation.com, the largest art sharing site online as far as I know and it's the reason I think this might make a good Openseed project.

I see the natural lifecycle of communities growing into something like this.

• You start a Community on one of the major frontends. (Steemit/Steempeak/etc)
• Your Community grows to the point that it's feasible to break off into your own frontend and token(SMT or SCOT).
• Depending on the specifics of your Community, you monetize it in a variety of ways and the entire Community continues to grow exponentially.
• You Community becomes its own independent, parallel economy.

In this lifecycle, the different communities, depending on their level of maturity, will probably need their own specific marketplace that exists on their frontend, and where their users buy and sell goods.

Having an open source turnkey solution that would be accessible to all and that wouldn't require each new Community to reinvent the wheel would be extremely powerful, and would really showcase the power of Steem and this open source vision I think we should be pushing here.

What do you all think? Is this something you'd like to see? Let me know in the comments. :)