A Timeline of Recent Steem Transaction Volumes

This chart shows the number of steem transactions per day, as reported by steemsql.com, and it is annotated with some of the things that might have affected the way the blockchain is being used.

And here is the same graph over a longer time scale with a 90-day moving average trend line.

Some thoughts:

• It is tempting to conclude that the "whale experiment" had increased usage, but of course correlation is not causation, and it's also not clear how much of that increased usage was traffic generated by the experiment itself (i.e. increased voting due to whale flagging and counter-voting, and increased posts and comments of people discussing the merits and challenges of the experiment).
• From the websockets disturbances, it appears that bots and other websockets users account for somewhere around half of all transactions.
• Up until mid-March, we were in a long term up trend. Recent events seem to have reversed the trend. However, there is room for hope that the increasing rewards pool will begin to reverse it again during the next 3 weeks.
• Much of the 2017 growth in transactions can probably be explained by the Winfrey-bot 1% voting guild.