Will Poloniex sink STEEM?

The Poloniex delisting was bound to happen sooner or later if the bear market for alts didn't improve significantly, but the low volume wasn't actually because of Steem at all. A lot of people might not remember but at around the same time Binance added Steem, Poloniex had the Steem wallet locked for many months which meant that there were many people who lost faith in it.

Here is a post I wrote a few days after the All Time High in regards to the Poloniex help desk. I had a transfer fail ( their fault) and at the time of writing, I was still waiting on th ticket to be seen 69 days after I added it. I did eventually get access to the funds again, but the wallet was still locked and it took ages to eventually get it out. Why the hell would I keep trading on Poloniex?

Having said that, it isn't great that STEEM is getting delisted from anywhere, but Poloniex has never been a large volume market, or at least for a very long time. When it comes to ETH trading, they are somewhere around 200th in volume, LTC 120th - I have never heard of CoinEgg... but damn they put some serious volume through ETH and LTC...

What is going to be interesting to see is what is going to happen on Bittrex and Binance as if you note the transfers of Steem out from the Poloniex wallet, most is going to those two exchanges.

https://steemitwallet.com/@poloniex/transfers

What is interesting to note is scrolling through the hundreds of transfers in the last 24 hours - very, very few transferred to a Steem account directly, it looks like 95%+ went to other exchanges. Ye of little faith.

Another interesting thing to consider is that there is still over 8 million Steem in the Poloniex account and while it stops trading there soon, 2 weeks or so after that the "grace period" to transfer it will be closed and I have no idea what happens to it from there. Do Poloniex claim it as theirs or, does it become a very large Steem sink - will they send whatever is left to @null?

That would be pretty awesome really (for those whose STEEM it isn't of course) as if for example 3 million STEEM was locked away, that would effectively be 1% of the entire supply. I do not know how possible this is, but I do think that there will be many who have gone crypto or Steem dormant and may never get the message. I don't know what the laws and the processes are for this, but it might become a decent sink.

As you can see from the STEEM markets list on CMC, 95% of the current volume is going through Bithumb, the Korean exchange that has locked STEEM but people are trading it backwards and forwards for some reason. If I remember correctly, it was also that exchange that drove the price of SBD up to 20 odd dollars (it has low supply so is easy to pump) and paid the highest price for Bitcoin back in the day - but, take that with a grain of salt as my memory might fail me.

While not a good sign to be delisted from any exchange, I think that in time it won't matter much if STEEM becomes one of the places that makes getting into crypto easy for the normies and, I don't mean for the trading. What many people forget is that the possibility to earn crypto in the way STEEM can and the expanding potential of SMTs and communities to come can put a lot of pressure on demand for Steem.

As I have said, I don't believe we need hundreds of millions of users to be successful, but if eventually that is what happened through SMT onboarding and cmmunities, the price of STEEM might be astronomical. But predicting price isn't an easy thing to do in an industry renowned for washtrading to attract investment interest by boosting transactional volumes and pump and dumps relatively easy to organize on any number of the thousands of shitcoins with no purpose out there.

However, regardless of price Steem still has a purpose and while many might not agree, the people of Steem take earning STEEM very seriously indeed. Not only that, they use STEEM to earn more STEEM and they use STEEM to interact and affect their investment through upvoting what they think is valuable, downvoting what they think is not, witness voting who they think helps and SPS voting what they think supports the ecosystem. Even if it is only on the Steem platform, STEEM has utility.

Some people see the Poloniex delisting as some kind of major blow, but I believe that most of that is a psychological issue about losses incurred and the fear of more losses to come. The volume itself was not very high on Poloniex and therefore didn't really change much of much. What I am hoping though is that with so much going to Binance and Bittrex, the trade volumes there increase so as not to get delisted from there also.

I guess that this is also one of the drawbacks of having a stakable utility coin because it will take volume off the markets in comparison to the purely speculative. With so much sitting on the exchanges waiting for some pump to sell though (100 millionish still?) the price is not going to go up any time soon and that means that the stake sitting there is not doing anything on Steem, but it is not going to likely be sold at these prices. This makes the decoupling from BTC very difficult because the only way it will rise in price is if dragged along with the herd, as the community isn't creating the demand for it through good usage to make Steem attractive and creating market scarcity which would drive the Steem economy to eventually be much more self-sufficient.

While not my area of expertise, I think that it can be these events that can drive the right people to stand up and act, and the wrong people to pack up and leave. For those leaving because Steem isn't worth enough to you, remember to lose your keys and add to the STEEM sink for the future or - just send it all to @null.

Hopefully Poloniex sinks whatever STEEM it has left over too.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]