That's a very valid and excellent question @gyrosean! Here's the Steemit Inc. whitepaper on SMTs. It'll help get to the roots of those questions.
To be honest, we don't have a full picture of what SMTs will look like either / how they'll be constructed off of the existing Steem Steem-Power SBD system. We believe that they'll act similarly to ERC20 tokens.... an ERC20 is to Ethereum as... an SMT is to Steem. (Steem being the backbone for everything.)