In November 2016, while Bitcoin was making headlines for crossing $711, a quieter revolution was unfolding on the blockchain. The concept of digital ownership — of earning real value from online content and collecting unique digital items — was taking its first tentative steps. Two projects in particular were proving that blockchain could do far more than move money: Steem was paying content creators directly for their posts, and Counterparty was enabling the first wave of blockchain-based digital collectibles on Bitcoin itself.
TL;DR
- Steem ranked 9th among all cryptocurrencies with a $41.4 million market cap on November 6, 2016, rewarding content creators with tokens
- Counterparty protocol on Bitcoin was enabling the creation and trading of digital assets, including the first Rare Pepe cards
- GameCredits was building a blockchain-based payment system for the gaming industry
- Bitcoin at $711.52 and Ethereum at $10.87 provided the foundation for an emerging digital creator economy
- The concept of digital scarcity and verifiable ownership was being proven on-chain for the first time
Steem: Where Content Met Compensation
At $0.2025 per token with a market capitalization of $41.4 million, Steem was the 9th most valuable cryptocurrency on November 6, 2016. But its significance went far beyond market rankings. Steem was the first blockchain platform to create a viable economic model for digital content creation — a social media platform where every upvote translated directly into token rewards.
The Steemit platform, launched earlier in 2016 by Dan Larimer and Ned Scott, had captured the crypto community’s imagination. Users who wrote popular blog posts could earn hundreds — sometimes thousands — of dollars in STEEM tokens. The system distributed rewards from a collectively managed reward pool, allocating tokens based on community voting. Unlike traditional social media platforms where creators earned fractions of a cent per view, Steem offered a direct relationship between content quality and financial compensation.
On November 6, Steem’s 24-hour trading volume reached $135,936, with the token experiencing a 53.69% increase over the previous seven days. Despite a short-term pullback of 5.40% over 24 hours, the weekly surge signaled growing interest in the social token model. The platform had already demonstrated that blockchain could fund content creation at scale — a concept that would later evolve into the broader “creator economy” narrative that dominated Web3 discussions in subsequent years.
Counterparty: Bitcoin’s First Digital Collectibles Engine
While Steem was reinventing social media economics, Counterparty was doing something equally revolutionary on the Bitcoin blockchain. Counterparty was a protocol built on top of Bitcoin that allowed users to create, issue, and trade custom digital assets — all secured by Bitcoin’s proof-of-work network. No separate blockchain needed, no additional security assumptions.
By November 2016, Counterparty had become the birthplace of something unexpected: digital art collectibles. The Rare Pepe phenomenon was just beginning. Artists were creating unique Pepe the Frog images and issuing them as Counterparty assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. A group known as the “Rare Pepe Scientists” curated submissions, filtering through thousands of designs and releasing approved cards as limited-edition digital collectibles.
These were, in essence, the first NFTs — though the term wouldn’t be coined until 2017. Each Rare Pepe card was a unique digital asset with verifiable scarcity, tracked on the Bitcoin blockchain. They could be bought, sold, and traded through Counterparty’s decentralized exchange. The idea that digital images could have provable ownership and scarcity was groundbreaking, even if the broader crypto world hadn’t yet caught on.
GameCredits: Blockchain Meets Gaming
Another project in the CoinMarketCap rankings that day was GameCredits (GAME), which was building a dedicated cryptocurrency payment solution for the gaming industry. With a vision to become the universal currency for in-game purchases, GameCredits aimed to solve problems that gamers and developers had struggled with for years — high payment processing fees, chargeback fraud, and limited payment options in developing countries.
The gaming industry was a $100+ billion market in 2016, but payment friction was a significant barrier, especially for developers in emerging markets. GameCredits proposed a blockchain-based alternative that would enable instant, borderless micropayments with minimal fees. While the project’s ambitions exceeded its execution, it represented an important early attempt to bring blockchain technology to mainstream digital entertainment — a use case that would later be validated by projects like Enjin, The Sandbox, and Axie Infinity.
The Technology Behind Digital Ownership
What made these projects possible in November 2016 was a convergence of maturing blockchain infrastructure. Bitcoin at $711.52 provided the security backbone — a battle-tested, decentralized network that had been running reliably for nearly eight years. Ethereum at $10.87 offered programmable smart contracts that could encode complex ownership and transfer rules. And protocols like Counterparty demonstrated that innovation could happen on top of existing blockchains without requiring separate networks.
The concept of digital scarcity was particularly significant. Before blockchain, digital items were infinitely reproducible — a digital image could be copied endlessly with no loss of quality. Counterparty’s asset system changed this equation. For the first time, a digital item could be provably scarce, with ownership verified by the immutable Bitcoin blockchain. This was the foundational insight that would eventually lead to the multi-billion dollar NFT market.
A Market in Transition
The broader crypto market context of November 6, 2016 is worth noting. Bitcoin’s dominance was overwhelming — its $11.36 billion market cap dwarfed everything else. But the top 20 cryptocurrencies included several projects focused on use cases beyond payments: Augur for prediction markets, DigixDAO for tokenized gold, Steem for social content, and the infrastructure provided by Counterparty. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization was approximately $13 billion, a fraction of today’s valuation but enough to support genuine innovation.
Just two days after this snapshot, two events would accelerate the trend toward digital alternatives. The US presidential election on November 8 would demonstrate the predictive power of decentralized markets. And India’s demonetization of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, announced the same day, would drive millions of Indians toward digital payments and cryptocurrency, dramatically increasing awareness of blockchain-based alternatives to traditional finance.
Why This Matters
November 2016 was the moment when blockchain began proving it could empower individual creators and collectors. Steem showed that content creators could earn directly from their work without intermediaries. Counterparty proved that digital items could be scarce, ownable, and tradeable. GameCredits suggested that gaming — one of the world’s largest entertainment industries — could be transformed by cryptocurrency payments.
These were not just theoretical possibilities. People were using these platforms. Steem was paying real money to bloggers. Rare Pepe cards were being traded for real Bitcoin on Counterparty’s decentralized exchange. The creator economy was being born on-chain, even if most of the world hadn’t noticed yet.
The legacy of these November 2016 experiments is everywhere in today’s crypto landscape. Every NFT marketplace owes a debt to Counterparty’s digital asset protocol. Every social token project builds on Steem’s insight that content has value. And every blockchain gaming company is pursuing the vision that GameCredits first articulated. The tools were primitive, the market was tiny, and most of these projects would eventually be superseded. But the fundamental ideas — digital scarcity, creator compensation, verifiable ownership — were already being proven on the blockchain in November 2016.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions.
steem at $41M market cap paying creators directly. now we have a hundred creator tokens and none of them actually pay creators
steemit was paying people hundreds of dollars for blog posts in 2016. now creators get paid in exposure and worthless governance tokens
Dan Larimer building something that worked, then leaving. the steemit to hive saga is one of the most under-told stories in crypto
GameCredits trying to build blockchain gaming payments. another project that was way ahead of its time and still somehow failed