I discovered Bitshares while reading about Steemit. It appears, Steemit is just the tip of the iceberg! Here's what I found out.

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#### What is Bitshares?

Bitshares is an **industrial-grade financial smart contract platform**. (definition as per Bitshares website)
Now what this means, is that Bitshares 2.0 is a very focused development platform to create financial blockchains and smart contracts.

This might seem familiar if you've heard of **Ethereum** before. Read on! :)

#### Why Bitshares is not Ethereum

Both Ethereum and Bitshares 2.0 are development platforms to build de-centralized blockchain applications.

However, Ethereum brings together both a crypto ledger and a Turing-complete programming language, which is a language that can be used to simulate any other computer language.

You might have heard of the recent "**hardfork**" event. Let's just say Ethereum lost a lot of fans because of it. Not ALL fans, however: Ethereum still has a very active development user base.

Bitshares on the other hand, can be seen as an "**evolved**" version of Ethereum.
It comes with a standard code base to support asset exchange businesses, a referral rewards program, price stable and pegged cryptocurrencies, a collateralized bond market, etc. All these built-in features make it **a lot more appealing** to banking and trading companies.

It is easier for financial institutions to consider a Bitshares 2.0 platform, as this platform supports a number of **key financial use cases**.

#### What does Bitshares have to do with Steemit?

Both the Bitshares platform and the Steemit blockchain are based on the **Graphene™** technology, an industrial strength software platform for deploying third generation cryptographically secure decentralized ledgers known as block chains.

Simply put, Bitcoin is seen as version 1.0 blockchain technology, Ethereum is Bitcoin 2.0 and Bitshares is blockchain 3.0.

Both Steemit and Bitshares, as well as the underlying Graphene™ technology, have been created by **our beloved devs, @ned and @dan** !
Now you understand why you should probably look into Bitshares ASAP, as the Steemit revolution will have its effect on Bitshares as well. **Made a nice profit on Steemit? Invest in Bitshares!**

#### Where to go from here?

There's an excellent introduction to Bitshares at http://docs.bitshares.eu/bitshares/user/first-steps-users.html
It's both an excellent source of information and it links to various exchanges where you can invest in this Bitcoin 3.0 technology!

Thanks for reading! In case of any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

https://www.steemit.com/r4fken