Currency behind social media website Steemit, in which users are rewarded or paid based number of 'thumbs up', has rocketed to more than $150m in value.

Steem, the digital currency behind the new social media website Steemit, soared more than 1,000% in value on Tuesday to more than $150m, two weeks after it first paid people who posted on its website, according to coinmarketcap.com.

Steemit rewards or pays users who post content that gets multiple thumbs up from the site's participants. The reward given is the steem currency. Content on the site is not limited to digital currencies and users have posted varied topics from lasagne to a trip to North Africa.

"It's basically an incentivized social media platform," said Steemit's chief executive, Ned Scott, in an interview. The steem currency's price on Tuesday was $1.75, equivalent to a market cap of $151.8m. That is the value of the 81.6m steems in circulation. On 4 July, when Steemit first paid users with steem for their content, the currency's value was only $13m, according to Scott.