I don't really know where SMT is going, there is talk of a token for companies. The adoption of SMT by companies will not be easy if it goes the same way. Inflation and without a wide market of the real economy that accepts it as a means of payment.
I've heard people say that over and over again for years and I keep reaching the same point with the question that never gets an answer:
What does a company need an SMT for?
Any company that wanted its own token that was tradable for some kind of value would use one from Ethereum, at this point. Nothing they really have to be responsible for, a relatively stable history of accessibility, an infrastructure that is at least reasonably established, and very little baggage. If they needed something more custom than that, it is literally trivial for them to set up their own blockchain with their own servers.
There are very few business processes that can make use of an ever-growing, access speed-limited mid-weight cluster database, however. That is exactly what a blockchain is. Inventory management is one of the few reasonable applications and that is pointedly not customer-facing nor something that you want anyone outside of the company to be running a server hosting.
I have literally not seen a decent single proposal for a business use case for SMTs which makes the constant litany of mumbled belief that it will be a game changer because companies will want to jump on board a little hollow.
That's before we get into the questions of inherent inflation as a means of the system "paying for itself" and why that fails and the absence of a supporting economic infrastructure.
The current model of the cryptocurrency including steem does not have enough architecture to achieve get mass adoption as a means of payment. I think these are the first steps with successes and mistakes, there is still a long way to go. Many things in this model will have to be adjusted over time so that these tokens can achieve it.
There are actually Bitcoin ATMs in my local gas station. I live in the suburban US Southeast, just outside Atlanta, Georgia. I have no idea if anyone actually makes use of these things, but it's interesting to note that someone thought there was enough business opportunity to start renting them out to relatively low-end businesses in an area you wouldn't normally think of as ripe for cryptocurrency. My suspicion is they're not saying a lot of traffic but someone remains incredibly optimistic.
My gut says that there is no way for cryptocommodities to become cryptocurrencies until/unless some major players decide that user accessibility is important, and that's just not happening. It is definitely and aggressively not happening with STEEM and cultural observations in the cryptocommodity community tell me that, on the whole, there is not a lot of demand for the shift in mindset that it would take for that success.
Here's the core issue: HODL. Think about how entrenched HODL is as a rallying cry. It's so entrenched on the STEEM side of things that the very idea of "cashing out" or selling your vast gets you treated like a pariah, and the more that you have that might be useful, the more that you get judged by certain very vocal members of the culture as an inherently bad person.
But exchanging a token for goods and services is exactly what makes a currency "a currency". You don't HODL a currency; you collected in order to exchange it for things you want. If you're holding onto a larger amount of it, it's with the expectation that you will trade it for things that you want in the future, not with the expectation that you will trade it for other currencies at an advantageous rate in the future. (We'll leave aside the entire industry of currency speculation for the moment, because those guys are crazy and for the most part it's effectively legalized gambling.)
That's not the only problem but it is something that acts as a fine example of why cryptocommodities are self-defeating a lot of the time right now.
I would be happy to take STEEM on my OpenBazaar storefront right now. But the people behind the Steem blockchain, both professionally with Steemit and more casually with other application interface developers, aren't interested in that. They have steered away from it, instead becoming ever more insular. They have decided that becoming isolated is better for "their investment" than aggressively seeking more contact with the outside.
How many exchanges can you trade STEEM on? At this point, I think the answer is "none," because Block Trades doesn't really count as an exchange – though I am willing to increase the account to "one" to take it into account. How does adding a potential myriad of variant tokens help me buy and sell the ones I already have to get stuff I want? It's the same question that really needs to be asked about Steem Engine tokens as well. Tribes is an interesting proof of concept when it comes to really awkwardly designed community mechanisms, but I have a fistful of different tokens in my wallet I can't do anything meaningful with. What good does that do me?
We need that question asked more often.