STEEM: The Whale Myth-A Deeper Look At Their Numbers

We heard it all before. STEEM has major problems because of the Whales. The accusations lobbed at them are consistent. We see this spun by many smaller accounts.

Here are just a few.

Whales care nothing but for themselves.
Whales rape the reward pool.
Whales only circle vote themselves.
Whales are destroying STEEM.

I decided to take a look deeper and see what is really going on.

Before going into the numbers, I will present a few points.

To start, the reward pool payout provides 75% to the content creators. This is an important fact to remember. The payout is based upon the upvotes that content receives. The remaining 25% goes to the voters in the form of curation.

Hence, the majority of the reward pool is going to those who create the content.

Each month I post the amount of SP held by the different categories on STEEM. I maintain that a shift is occurring where the Whales are losing power could be accelerated by smaller accounts posting more (collectively). Nevertheless, the numbers do show that the Whales are getting weaker in terms of their influence on this blockchain.

Another point to remember is that only STEEM powered up provides influence. Many want to point that larger accounts can power down and move their STEEM to exchanges. Yes they can do that. They can also exchange Bitcoin for STEEM, buy EOS with their STEEM, or an assortment of other currency transaction including fiat.

We can only focus upon STEEM that is powered up. If we are going to discuss STEEM on exchanges, then we should also consider the USD holdings of people which could result in the purchase of STEEM. It is impossible to consider all that could potentially be SP.

So let us look at the Whale accounts over the last 7 days and see what they are up to.

When we look through the numbers the first thing that jumps out is that there is only one account posting. @adsactly posted 15 times in the last week, an average of two a day. That is all for the 36 largest accounts on STEEM.

Now we can see why the number of MVests for these accounts is continually declining. From the author standpoint, they are taking very little as a group out of the reward pool.

What about curation? With the SP they hold, they can pay themselves big sums.

Again, we see that this is not what most do. Almost 2/3 of the accounts do not vote meaning they get zero from the reward pool. That leaves 1/3 who do a bit of voting.

There are 4 that placed over 1,000 votes, with three of them going to 800 voteees or more. This exactly what everyone wants. There is one account that could be flagged for the behavior since most of the votes when to a handful of accounts.

Of course, if we delve deeper, we see that @adm is not engaging in circle voting or reward pool rape.

It does appear that @adm is a supporter of Steemcleaners and other accounts that are designed to fight spam and behavior that is not in the best interest of STEEM. That does not appear to be someone who does not care about STEEM.

Of the other accounts that give upvotes only to a handful of accounts, we know one was in the middle of an major reward pool battle that took place. Thus, we know where this account stands.

There you have it. Of all the Whales, there are 1, possibly 2, that are engaged in self serving behavior. The truth is that most Whales are inactive. They do not grow their accounts since they neither post nor vote. This means the majority of SP on the blockchain is not used by these accounts. In fact, there is a great deal of delegation to other applications that are further distributing upvotes among the user base.

Therefore, I stand by my initial conclusion: The reward pool is there for those who want to create content. When the largest accounts with almost 60% of the SP are not posting content, that means there is a lot of the reward pool available for everyone else.

This is shown in the numbers. It is easy to see why the Whales are consistently losing the number of MVests. Anything that is powered down is not replaced, at least from the reward pool.

One final thought. It seems many get caught up on the idea of a larger account setting up many smaller accounts and funding that with SP so as to engage in circle voting. While an account can do that, the fact is there is no advantage gained in terms of power. 3M SP in one account or 100K in 30 accounts carries the same power on the blockchain.

Hopefully this give a bit of clarity to what is taking place on the blockchain. While there might be a few bad actors on STEEM, for the most part, the Whales are not the ones participating. In fact, we could summarize by saying the Whales are mostly absent.

Just because people repeatedly say Whales are abusing the system, that does not make it true.

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If you found this article informative, please give it an upvote and resteem.

This information was compiled using steemdb.com and steemworld.org with the voting chart from steemreports.