SteamPeak DApp Review — Steem Front-End for Power Users!

6 min readMar 21, 2019

The current media landscape has been changing immensely, due to the wide availability of ways for regular people to publish their own inner thoughts into the world. Social media and traditional blogging platforms were the first step in this direction and now we’re seeing yet another revolution with the creation of decentralized media platforms.

SteemPeak is a front-end to the Steem blockchain, which allows users to perform highly technical tasks with the click of a button. As far as decentralized applications go (DApps), it offers one of the more polished experiences to users for interacting with the Steem blockchain.

Truth be told, SteemPeak is a hidden gem among all the different Steem user interfaces. Its user-base is still fairly small, but is showing consistent growth when you look at their usage statistics on State of the DApps.

*Steempeak Activity Stats provided by* *State of the Dapps*

Getting Started

To start using SteemPeak, you will need to create an account on the Steem blockchain. You can easily do this by clicking on the Signup button on the Steempeak website itself. There you can choose from 3 different options to create a new account, I recommend creating a new Steem account through SteemNinja, since that will take the least amount of time and will immediately give you a 15 Steem Power delegation to get you started.

Of course it is also possible to create a free account on the Steem blockchain, but free accounts need to be approved first, which could take quite a lot of time. Creating a new account through Steem Monsters might be a good option for you, if you are looking to play the Steem Monsters trading card game on the Steem blockchain.

SteemPeak’s Features

Content Discovery

Discovering interesting content on the Steem blockchain has never been easier. SteemPeak offers you a wide variety of ways to find exactly the sort of content that you enjoy consuming. Take a look at the Explore section on SteemPeak, there you will the content that’s currently popular on the Steem blockchain.

You can use the sidebar on the left (1) to look for popular topics that you’re interested in, you can also search for topics that aren’t displayed. When you click on a topic (or add one yourself), you will see all articles that are categorized under those topics. Clicking on the star icon next to the topic title (2), will add that topic to your favorites (3), for easy access in the future.

There’s also a wide variety of filters you can use on the Explore page, the power of those really come into effect when you’re following a lot of different people & topics. Following someone is easy, you just click on their username and you will see a Follow button in their profile header.

Content Creation

This is where SteemPeak really shines, their post editor is incredibly intuitive and has a lot of functions that post editors on other Steem front-ends do not have. I’m currently using their post editor for writing this post and I’ve noticed that I’m saving quite a lot of time, thanks to the side-by-side view of my post editor & the post preview.

At the bottom of the post editor, you also have some functionality that’s specifically targeted at power users. You can add beneficiaries, who will receive a percentage of your post payout and you can also save your entire post as a template, so you can save your formatting for future use. With the addition of Advanced post options, you can even publish your post under a different author or hide your post from appearing in your blog and follower’s feed.

Wallet

The wallet page on SteemPeak offers a bit more functionality compared to the default wallet on Steemit. You can easily delegate Steem Power from within your wallet and you can also see which SteemEngine tokens you hold. It’s a bit sad to say this, but SteemPeak’s wallet is also a lot less buggy than the official Steemit wallet. You can easily view all past transactions and everything just feels a lot more snappy.

Settings

The number of tweaks that you can perform to change your experience on SteemPeak is nothing short of amazing. When you go to your account settings, you’ll see that you’re able to completely change how SteemPeak looks and performs. Most of these settings are only available on the SteemPeak DApp and they’re part of the reason why I’m referring to SteemPeak as the Steem interface for power-users.

How does SteemPeak stack up against other media DApps on Steem?

Room for Improvement

SteemPeak would be even more amazing if there was one single page where all the functionality was explained. Currently, new users are kind of left to fend for themselves and have to look up certain functions via Google in order to find out how particular things work. It would be an improvement if there was a bit more information on their FAQ page, especially with more details about the different functions of SteemPeak. Also note that the FAQ page itself was a bit hard to find, since it’s located in the About section when you click on your username.

Also, for all the different settings that they have, I would have expected that I would have been able to change how the post rewards are displayed. I personally just want to see the Dollar values of posts by default and not the STU (Steem Token Unit) values. I was unable to change this in the settings.

Conclusion

SteemPeak is a great interface for the Steem blockchain and I am going to be using it as my default interface in the future! Compared to other Steem front-ends, such as Esteem/Busy/Steemit/Etc, SteamPeak looks a lot more polished and intuitive. Some of the functionality that SteamPeak has, I’ve never seen anywhere else, that alone makes it the best front-end for the Steem blockchain in my opinion!

I have no other choice but to give SteemPeak a 5 star rating, as it’s one of the finest media DApps I’ve personally ever used!