The gif above is based upon the daily statistics posts made by @arcange. They show three dates, the last is the data on yesterday and the first is in early October, a period of just over 3 months.

The timespan chosen is arbitrary, in that it is as far back as I could scroll on Steemit.com. In that 3 months, you can see that every class other than whales have grown significantly in terms of their share of the Steem Vesting Fund (ie. Steem Power).

Whales

The largest and dominant class have grown 8.9% in terms of MV. As a percentage of the pie, they have declined from 78% to 67% or 14%. Today there are only 37 whales out of well over 500,000 accounts, and compared to 43 in October 2017.

Orcas

In absolute terms, Orcas were the fastest growing class, with a gain of 22,649 MV in three months. That represents 54% growth, very healthy growth although paltry compared to the lower brackets in relative terms. The number of Orcas have grown from 201 to 234, an increase of 33 or 16%.

Dolphins

Dolphins have grown a whopping 80% in MV. Like Orcas, their numbers grew 16%. Dolphins now represent 9.5% of the entire vesting fund, compared to 6.6% 3 months ago. Whales, Orcas and Dolphins still represent a tiny portion of Steem users, but represent 92.6% of the stake.

Minnows

"Minnow" is a bit of a misnomer, given that in order to be a Minnow today you must have about $2,500 worth of Steem Power and you can easily be considered among the 'steem elite', as even "Minnows" are within the top 2% of Steem accounts. Hardly the smallest of fish.

Yet Minnows are showing themselves to be the true 'middle class' of Steem with enormous growth. If current trends continue they should be a larger constituency than Dolphins within a few months.

In the last 3 months, they have grown from 6178 MV together to 19177 MV, or 210%! Their numbers have also swelled from 5475 to 6633 or 21%.

Redfish

Redfish are any user account below the level of a minnow which has made a transaction in the recent past. In the past three months, their collective stake has grown an astonishing 6,587%! Their population has exploded to nearly 120,000 active Redfish accounts.

Observation and Prediction

In absolute stake terms, the fastest growing bracket is Orcas, but in relative terms, every lower bracket is outperforming the one above. Particularly in the case of Minnows vs. Dolphins and Dolphins vs. Orcas, the lower bracket is growing at a fast enough % rate, that we could see them overtake the above bracket within the year 2018. Dolphins will likely have more stake together than Orcas within a few months, and Minnows could have more stake than Dolphins a few months after that.

It will take many years for Whales to no longer be the dominant segment. The data shows that it is happening. First all the other brackets combined will surpass whales within a few years, then one of the lower brackets will. Given that it is several years out, it could be minnows or even redfish that surpass whales first, rather than orcas or dolphins. While that timeframe is an era when you measure it by the lightning fast changes that happen in the crypto space, a few years is nothing in the grand scheme of things. 10 years from now, assuming this experiment is still going on, the stake distribution will be so drastically different that we'll be wondering what the fuss was all about.

Another observation is that we need more brackets. All the data is about less than 2% of accounts, and if Steem is to succeed, then "Minnow" will likely always be a fairly elite status by the current definition, 500 Steem Power would be a fortune if the network were operating on the same scale as Facebook, or even just Reddit.