Current Price of Steem:

In dollars: $0.089186 (18.87%) 

In Bitcoin: 0.00007272 BTC (17.97%)

Market Cap

In dollars: $21,641,333

 
In Bitcoin: 17,645 BTC

Volume (24h)

In dollars: $283,371

In Bitcoin: 231.04 BTC

Circulating Supply

242,654,196 STEEM

Total Supply

259,628,290 STEEM 

The above data is taken from: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/  

My Thoughts:

Some interesting things stick out when looking at the numbers above. For one, the price is actually going up. That is a welcome sign. Secondly, check out the dollar volume traded in the last 24 hours, ($283k). That is not a small number... In fact that is one of the largest numbers I have seen in some time. That shows that a good amount of money is changing hands at these low prices. That is a good thing and often what you see at or near bottoms. However, I am not so sure as of yet this may indeed be the signs of a bottom...

The biggest question in my mind becomes, why is Steem going up?

The way I see it, the likely culprits are one of 3 possibilities. The likeliest of 3 in my opinion are listed below:

1. Is Steem going up because most of the other cryptocurrencies are going up right now?

If you haven't checked many other currencies you couldn't throw a rock without hitting one that is going up significantly today. Is this a case of a rising tide lifts all boats? You see that a lot in the stock market but things have been quite different in crypto land. 

In my opinion this one is not the most likely as we have seen plenty of other days when most currencies were moving up while steem was moving down. However, now that we have passed the 13 week power down time frame, will steem move more like the others in terms of price action?

2. Is Steem going up because of the HF that is scheduled to happen tomorrow?

In my opinion this is the most likely culprit. If you have looked at recent history you will see that steem often spikes on the eve of HF implementation. In the past you would see a couple day run up of massive volume and massive percentage gains a couple days before the HF, only to see the price fall right back down to where it was (and eventually lower) in the days and weeks following the HF. Will this be more of the same? Unfortunately that is what I am thinking...

Big players run the price of in anticipation of big news hoping to gather in many more buyers with hopes of selling to those buyers at higher prices. 

3. Is steem going up because of the current experiment taking place on the platform regarding vote canceling?

If you haven't been following yesterday and today there has been a new experiment going on being performed by many of the active whales on the platform. They have either stopped voting on posts or are downvoting the other whales that are still voting in an effort to "even out the playing field". There are several reasons why they are doing this, which I won't get into here. 

There are those who are strongly in favor of this idea and those that are strongly against it. Could this possibly be the reason for the recent price spike? It certainly is possible, but in my mind this is probably the least likely culprit of the price spike...

*Steem could also be going up for some other reasons not mentioned above. Cryptocurries are ripe for manipulation. 

Conclusion:

So there you have it. My opinion is that the recent price spike is just a run of the mill ramp up into the event type of thing where big holders sell the actual event. We have seen it time and time again with Steem and we likely are seeing it play out yet again this time. I hope I am wrong though as I would love to see Steem sitting somewhere north of $.30...

What do you guys think? What is the likeliest driver for the recent price spike?

Follow: @jrcornel