The steem prices have been coming down a lot in this bear market and not only in terms of $ but also in terms of other cryptos. We had steem at a rank around 30 on coinmarketcap and now we sit at 53 dropping further.

It is normal that smaller coins suffer more in a bear market than bigger coins, but dropping ranks means that steem is also falling compared to similar sized coins.

_Steem has not only fallen a lot compared to $, but also compared to BTC. Litecoin (in the second chart) on the other hand has remained much more stable compared to BTC. _

Steem has its problems

Part of the reason why steem is dropping is certainly related to the numerous open problems that exist on steem. Steemit mismanagement, bugs in HF20 along with a terrible rollout, delay of SMT's, bidbots, flawed economic models and many many more. But to be honest all other coins have their problems. Crypto is still in its infancy and mistakes along the way cannot be avoided. While I do not know many of the other coins in the 50-60 range that well, I think if I would look there I would find enough dirt as well.

Steem has real world adoption

I think what is the real problem for Steem is that it was used quite a lot by normal people, much more than most other coins. There was a number of people that collected their main income from steem. This does not happen for many other coins. Bitcoin is very strong, but how many people can live from bitcoin? There are only a few big players offering wallets, exchanges and the like. Average non-tech nerds may have some BTC, but they are not getting paid in BTC!

When BTC crahses, some of the big players generating income in BTC will have to leave the space. But most of them have a much longer term position and will continue. But when steem crahses there are lots of people that suddenly find themselves unable to support their lives. All of them are forced out of the steem economy and have to find another job.

This creates a double downwards momentum for steem. First we will see less good content here. Then the old content producers need to cash out to pay for their expenses. All of this because we had a real world use case for average people!

The Future

This downtrend will naturally end when very few people that still live from the chain. And I think we are at that point. Most bloggers make much less money than needed to survive. The few exceptions are bigger projects that will likely survive the bear. And most important in bull conditions if this is really the reason for the current drop, it can revert! We have already demonstrated that normal people can get some real income by posting and when crypto prices rise this should be reverted and lead to steem rising more than most other coins.