I'm not sure if this information is relevant to your research. I'm no expert in Steem, but I remember more than a year ago watching videos from early users who bragged that all you had to do to earn tons of STEEM was to simply stake your tokens and wait. In the early days, the staking rewards were much more abundant, and the number of accounts receiving rewards were very few compared to now. I even remember one guy bragging that he posted his high school term paper, and earned thousand of SP. But to be honest, I don't see how you can go from 8,000 SP to more than 4,000,000 in a little over a month!!! I can only imagine that this was some kind of flaw in the system, otherwise, it doesn't make sense!