How Many Active Users/Accounts the Steem Blockchain Actually Has?
How many active accounts the Steem blockchain actually has?
We have all hear the number on the users posting, with some speculation like 2k daily, 10k monthly etc.
To answer properly this question, first we need to have a definition for an active user.
What does the active user actually represent?
In the good old Bitcoin days, users or wallet addresses were able to do only one thing on the blockchain. Transfers value/coins. Then comes the smart contracts, Ethereum, and finally Steem.
On the Steem blockchain, users can do a lot more than just transfer coins.
Here are some of the actions:
- Post and comment
- Vote
- Transfer coins
- Make Custom JSON transactions
- Reading
That last activity reading is actually not stored on the blockchain and it’s a bit neglected for this type of analysis. I will try to provide some numbers on this, cause it is worth noting it is the highest activity of them all. That is what makes more add income, that the giant social media are fighting for.
When we look at some of the popular ranking websites for crypto dapps we can see that they are ranking the dApps by transactions. At least that is what is wirten. Here is a screenshot from the stateofdapps.
https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings
Daily Active Users, or DAU (unique source addresses in transaction to DApp contracts)
The steemapps.com crated by @therealwolf is more of a Steem native web ranking site. Here is the definition they have put in.
DAU are unique users over a specific timeframe, who are either transferring to the app, creating custom_jsons of the app or creating posts/comments with the app. Important: The real number of users can be much higher with specific apps due to missing data, which we're not able to fetch.
This is a bit more accurate definition than the one on stateofdapps. Plus, they have put in a bit of a disclaimer in the definition itself. That’s is ok. Looking at the number on stateofdapps and steemapps, most probably stateofthedapps is getting the numbers from steemdapps, just they have a different definition in.
As stated above SteeApps is taking in consideration the following activities:
- Post and comment
- Transfer coins
- Make Custom JSON transactions
One of the most important action on the Steem blockchain, voting is not counted here. After all, Steem sometimes is referred as the upvote of the internet.
Number of Users/Account by Action
Now as we have seen the different action lets take a look at the number of users for all of them.
Posting – Number of Accounts that Posts or Comment
Here is the chat of the number of accounts that made a post, starting from May 2019.
Note: This is a number for the account that posted, not a number of posts per day. One account can make more than one post per day.
The number of accounts that made a daily post on May 1st, 2019 was 6631. After this the number has been going down until September 2019 when it reached around 4000 daily accounts. In the last months this number has been in the range between 3500 and 4000 with a slight increase in the number of accounts posting in the last period.
Next the number of daily accounts commenting.
As for the posts, the trend is similar here as well. Although it is noticeable that less accounts are commenting per day than posting. Starting from around 4k accounts in May 2019, finishing with 2700 accounts in February 2020.
Voting - Number of Users/Account that Vote
How about the number of daily accounts that vote. What is there number. After all the voting feature on the Steem blockchain is at its core. Rewards are distributed via votes. Here is the chart.
The number of unique daily accounts that vote is much higher than the number of accounts that post or comment. It started with more than 40k accounts voting in May 2019, ending with around 30k accounts that vote daily. Some of this account may be bots and vote on auto, but still this is quite a decent number of accounts.
Transfers – Number of Accounts that are making transfers
What about the basic crypto activity? Transferring value. How many users are making daily transactions? Here is the chart.
There is quite a significant drop in this category, from more 10k daily accounts transferring in May 2019 (a weird spike to 14k) to 5200 accounts in February 2020. Not totally sure but I think that the large number of account transacting in May 2019 is due to the higher activity on the gambling dApps at the time.
Custom JSON – Number of Accounts that are making custom JSON transactions
The custom JSON activity has been on a rise on the Steem blockchain, mainly because of the games using this functionality.
How is the number of unique daily users on this activity?
We can notice a trend of slow increase in the number of the unique accounts that are making custom JSON transactions daily. The number of accounts making custom JSON dropped from more than 10k in May 2019 to around 8500 in June, July. Since than it has been slowly increasing reaching more than 10k again.
Nice round 10k unique accounts that are making custom JSONs daily.
Overall number of active accounts
Now that we have seen the breakdown in account making different activities, lets take a look at the overall active accounts.
First the chart on accounts by activity.
This is a chart for number of unique daily accounts by activity on February 15, 2020.
As we can notice the numbers of accounts that vote is the largest, with almost 30k accounts voting per day, next are the accounts that make custom JSONs with around 10k, followed by the transactions 5k, and accounts that post 3.8k and comment 2.7k.
If we combine the above and make an overall number of unique daily accounts making one of the activities above that number for February 15, 2020 is 36,973.
Looking back from the start of 2020 with data points twice per month the chart for overall Daily Active Users looks like this.
A slight drop from 36k to 31k, and back to 36k.
It would be interesting to see the number of monthly active users as well. That is another great indicator. Maybe around the 100k?
Readers
Since the main App build on the Steem blockchain, Steemit, is a blogging platform the obvious question is how many readers it has. The numbers presented above are about authors, curators, gamers, etc… users that actually interact with the blockchain with some action.
The number of readers is not stored on the blockchain. The interesting thing is that there is more than one frontend to the blockchain, no there is no one single point of entrance to count.
According to https://hypestat.com/ the steemit.com web has around 220k unique daily visitors. Steempeak has around 50k. The others interfaces and tribes have some more. Some of them may overlap but I would give a rough estimate of 250k daily overall daily visitors. Have in mind this is very rough estimate.
A note on the number of active users
I see a lot of comments like, the crypto X has 100k telegram members. Crypto Y has a 500k telegram members. Comparing Telegram members with Daily Active Users, or even Monthly Active Users is misleading. I’m a member of a bunch of telegram groups and a lot of them I haven’t visited in months.
On Steem we have an extremely active and dedicated user base. They are voting, posting, playing games on a daily level. Most of all they are interacting and connecting with each other and making friends and business relations. Using and offering services, developing a new economy. They are sort of workers on the Steem blockchain. They are ready to use and test new products and dApps on a daily level. Because of this we have seen the growth of Splinterlands, (most likely the best game in crypto), video sharing platforms like 3Speak, Dtube, countless tribes from Steem Engine, and many apps more coming up daily (Holy Bread, SteemCity). All we need is a little push 😊.
All the best
@dalz
Posted via Steemleo
It is sad that there are more accounts posting than commenting. Making some sort of engagement score visible on front ends would help people make better voting decisions to avoid voting for accounts that post mpre often than they comment.
Yes, I was surprised by this as well.... Users tend to think .... hey come and check my post .... but the truth is if you like people to check your post, you will need to work on your engagement a lot
I get put off when people ask for votes or tell me to check something out. Engage my interests, not my attention. I hate ads.
It does take patience and practice, but acceleration is necessary to get to speed.
that could be doable since Steemworld shows posts, comments and replies ... I'm showing 715 posts, 9480 comments and 8841 replies ... some sort of score should be possible from that information. The problem would be how to eliminate the automated comments.
Yeah, things just become increasingly complex when we try to consider everything. The bots that just do [almost] the same comment over and over again can probably be eliminated without too much difficulty. As can really short comments like 'Thanks' or 'Good job'. Or there could be a human element where moderators look for people with over a certain amount of comments and just manually reduce the rank.
I think one problem STEEM is facing, is that a lot of interaction doesn't take place on the blockchain itself but in several discord channels and other places, so that STEEM partly appears like an empty ghost (and bot) town. I would prefer if as much communication as possible happened directly on the blockchain.
I agree too. Let's start with that town hall meeting between justin and the witnesses. Typing it out as a permanent record on steem will be great.
Posts with declined rewards, daily comment threads or mini posts should be a thing.
If such a tiny ass active community can keep the price at this level I can't even imagine what having 300k, 3 million or even 30 million, all small numbers by a social medias standard but I mean what would that do to the price. Lol my mouth waters just thinking about it
A man can dream eh ..... :)
But overall the number of active users of crypto apps in general is small.
They all count in the range of couple of thousands.
The number of bitcoin holders (45M wallets) or the other top 10 crypto may be bigger, but just as wallets and passive holders. Actual people doing things on crypto apps is still tiny tiny .... meaning we can grow a lot....
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I've long wondered about this, you should make this a monthly update, at least!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 5/20 - need recharge?)
Thanks!
Will revisit it from time to time.
I definitely would be in the category of an active reader. I have only really tested the features of the platform but love to read the things creators have to offer.
Well looks like you just started!
Put a profile photo, engage and enjoy the ride :)
I suspect a significant number of the voters are absent autovoters.
I wonder if there is any way to detect how many are autovoters by looking to see if they vote continually at exactly the same time?
Of course they might be autovoters but still present on the chain for other reasons.
Yes that is right. Not sure, but their may be a method to eliminate autovotes. In most of the cases users have autovotes and manual votes. I know that is how I do it :)