I think people might also be reacting to the consensus on Hard Fork 19 to flatten the reward curve, and Ned's statement that communities are coming in this quarter.
In any case, good times for Steem holders! And ETH holders and Dash holders and Bitshares holders and Bitcoin holders... :-)
BTW, Ned told me there was going to be something like Communities way back in about November last year. Promises Promises.
I have just started building a properly designed peer to peer chat system for Dawn now, that really is not that complicated, and it's not like I haven't been dropping the idea pretty clearly for anyone else to pick up on, yet nobody is... Oh well. In a couple of months I expect it will be full release grade and the mesh will be up and running. It will include everything that Rocketchat and Discord do, except no central servers at all. Like bitmessage, but without python or proof of work (It will be a light go backend with sqlite database and file store, with gRPC interfaces that can be used by front end applications). And it will include the ability for a user to ignore! Why is it so many chats these days except the most popular ones leave out this function??? When I say 'ignore' it won't just be interface side, the server backend will literally not store the designated asshat's messages at all. Or relay them.
Sounds like you're making great progress. It's very satisfying to design systems and then bring them to fruition. Keep up the good work!
I attribute 90% of this simply to the pegging algorithm.
I am holding a bit of bitcoin for good measure as well. It might hedge me a bit in what are clearly very uncertain times.
BTW, I was campaigning for that hard for 3 months now. You are welcome.