Steem: So HIGH, but still very low!
I love Steem, the blockchain, the cryptocurrency and the ecosystem, and as a result I am very active here and predicting an impressive growth ahead! We only scratch the surface of its potential with this small (yes, small!) 1 million accounts created.
I've seen over the past few months some incredible pieces of content, in various niches, and more creators learning about Steemit every day and joining. The most important advertising avenue I've seen is "word of mouth", and this will only grow with the number of happy users.
If we take a look at various analysis made by entities which apparently have no bias toward Steem, here's what we see.
We have recently seen a report issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and IT, which maybe surprisingly for me (considering it comes from a government), places Steem second in a top of the best blockchains which exist right now, only surpassed by Etherium.
The top takes into consideration three factors, and each determine a sub-index: technology, application and innovation.
Steem scored the highest at technology, and quite high (compared to the other blockchains) at innovation, but the lowest at application. I still wonder what "application" stands for so that Steem could score so low?
On another front, Steem holds the record of the number of transactions per day among all blockchains (with 2,522,380Tx, according to blocktivity.info - you can see a screenshot below), and is constantly placed first at this chapter, at an important length from any other blockchain. Today, the second comes BitShares, another of Dan Larimer's creations, and only after that, the blockchains which hold the first two positions by market capitalization, Etherium and Bitcoin.
And if we need confirmation, in the ratings Weiss updates weekly for cryptocurrency, Steem is usually rated among the first. Currently it has a B rating, along with another 13 top currencies. Ratings go from A to D, A being the best and D the worst, and there are no As at the moment.
Recently more good news came:
- SteemBTC and SteemUSDT pairs were listed on the Chinese (again?) exchange Huobi (probably the 4th in the world by volume)
- Ned Scott had an impressive marketing tournament starting in Korea, following Japan and the interview at Bloomberg TV and culminating with the Consensus and his participation on one of the panels
If we consider all of the above, that means Steem is an awesome blockchain/crypto/ecosystem. So, how come it only has the 31st market cap at the moment? Why Steem - the cryptocurrency - rarely, if ever, goes into the top 50 cryptos by daily (or even monthly) trading volumes?
Here are a few reasons I can think of:
- Steem is still not traded on so many exchanges, or, in some cases, the exchanges where it was traded invoke errors to stop supporting the SteemBTC pair (Poloniex)
Why is that? I'm not sure, but Huobi's example to list two pairs with Steem as a base, may be one in the right direction. - There are some bottlenecks preventing rapid growth, and Ned Scott mentioned this in the conclusion of his latest blog post:
There are only a small number of bottlenecks to resolve before we as a community will have the opportunity to exploit the asymmetric growth opportunities that Communities and SMTs will bring.
- Businesses and investors may be standing by to see how the implementation of the SMTs works out
All in all, it looks like a matter of time (and of successful updates), before Steem will begin to take its rightful place among the top crytocurriencies!
Steem is something I am truly confident in. I have no doubt every bit of Steem you get will be gold in the future.
That's pretty much my own reasoning too, especially since the more people join, the harder it will be to get Steem, because the reward pool will more or less be the same.
This would most likely be one of the engines that will drive the price up. Only one of them.