Coin Market Caps

The market capitalization of a cryptocurrency is usually the price of the coin muliplied by the number of coins in existence. This is often a good way to compare the relative size of a cryptocurrency, but it comes with a few problems. The most obvious one is the trivialness with which you can have a "fake market cap". If you have trillions of junkcoin, and sell one to your friend for $1, does it have a $trillion market cap? Maybe we should ask Ripple about that. Some cryptos have other traits which complicate market cap as a metric. Steem for example has both liquid Steem and Steem Power. Added together they formed a market cap back in July which was enough to be the third largest in crypto. It was rightly pointed out that only a small fraction of this was actually liquid Steem, available for trade on the market. This made the market cap "artificial" in some sense. Some other cryptos have similar issues, with a large percentage of their caps either held in reserve by founders/early adopters, or in an illiquid staking mechanism comparable to Steem Power.

Aside from comparisons to other cryptos, the market cap of Steem creates a bigger problem in comparing to itself. Just as the market cap in July was artificial in comparison to other cryptos, using market cap today creates an artifically poor comparison to its earlier self. Today's Steem does not have the same inflationary model as it did prior to Hard Fork 16. Liquid Steem is now a major component, has been growing rapidly and will continue to grow as a portion of the overall market cap until it reaches some equilibrium point.

Steem Liquid Cap

The Steem Liquid Cap is the total supply of Liquid Steem* multiplied by the price of Steem. It is a metric for comparing Steem primarily only to itself. As Liquid Steem becomes a larger percent of the total cap, it is arguably a more "real" metric for the growth of Steem demand because it represents Steem which is actually available on the market. Neither the market cap nor the liquid cap say the whole story, as Steem Power which is not being powered down does clearly represent demand for Steem as well, but this metric can be used in addition to market cap.

Some dates, based on archives I can find**:

19th June 2016
Liquid supply: 5,470,883
Price: $0.292
Market cap: $17,430,381
Liquid cap: $1,597,498
Liquid percent: 9.2%

16th of September 2016
Liquid Supply: 8,287,330
Price: $0.499
Market Cap: $72,453,511
Liquid Cap: $4,135,377
Liquid percent: 5.7%

27th of October 2016
Liquid Supply: 13,203,896
Price: $0.138
Market Cap: $26,249,215
Liquid Cap: $1,822,137
Liquid percent: 6.9%

4th of February 2017
Liquid Supply: 35,429,452
Price: $0.165
Market Cap: $38,377,926
Liquid Cap: $5,845,859
Liquid percent: 15.2%

21st of April 2017
Liquid Supply: 62,975,119
Price: $0.22
Market Cap: $51,687,153
Liquid Cap: $13,854,526
Liquid percent: 26.8%

Observation: While the market cap has been growing slowly in recent months, the liquid cap has been growing extremely fast. Today the market cap is only twice what it was on October 27th last year, but the liquid cap has grown nearly 8 times in the same period.

* Perhaps it should also include the virtual Steem locked up in SBD, given that SBD is also a liquid token.

** I would appreciate if someone could point out a better way of finding the liquid supply on a certain date than just hoping that steemd.com was archived on that day. It would be especially useful to have them on key dates such as price peaks and lowest points. There are @elyaque's reports but they don't go back to the bubble period

Sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://steemd.com/
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/