One Third Of All STEEM Is Traded For Fiat, Not Bitcoin - A Potential Decoupling Of The Asset From BTC
Below is a list of the top STEEM exchanges, ranked by their volume (data pulled from Coinmarketcap):
Since I watch the markets every day, I get to see some interesting patterns. Some of them may generate trends, some of them are temporary and nothing gets out of them. While looking at the recent days market evolution, in which we saw mostly sideways trading, I observed that STEEM behaved differently. It didn't follow the main BTC moves, it was a bit decoupled.
The first reason that comes to mind for this behavior is that STEEM trading volume is not that big on the STEEM/BTC pair. In other words, since its volume is not strongly coupled with BTC, any variations of Bitcoin should be less important. So I took the screenshot above, and ran some numbers.
According to this simple math, about 36% of the entire STEEM volume is in KRW orUSDT (Upbit + Huobi). Only two thirds of the entire STEEM volume are traded against BTC / ETH. The rest is more or less "fiat" (Korean Won, or USDT).
I think this is a very relevant number. It's not 5 or 10 percents. It's more than one third. One of every STEEM traded out there is traded for some sort of fiat.
A complete (or at least solid) decoupling of STEEM from Bitcoin would be very beneficial. Here are just a few reasons:
- the potential of releasing debt payment instruments denominated directly in fiat / STEEM pairs (debit cards that can be topped up directly with STEEM)
- insulation against Bitcoin price variation
- increased token adoption and usage
It's relatively early to proclaim STEEM's decoupling from Bitcoin, but it's one of those trends that I get to spot by doing the daily market snapshots. It may or it may not become a trend, but one third of the volume in "fiat" is relevant.
For comparison, EOS (5th place on CMC) has more than 50% of the trading volume in some sort of "fiat", Zcash (21st place) only 29% and Bytecoin (19th place) less than 1%.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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USDT is NOT fiat
Its worse :D
USDT is Tether, which is more ore less stable. Or at least way more stable than Bitcoin.
We need few more exchanges that deals directly with fiat to steem conversion.
I agree with this. It's pretty difficult to trade lesser known cryptos directly for fiat still..
I strongly disagree with any "decoupling story" I hear. If anything, its will decouple from fiat as bitcoin adoption rises.
You could say that, sooner or later, all cryptos will decouple from fiat, because fiat value will spiral down. I'm talking just about the current context, in which a significant amount of STEEM suply, namely a third, is traded on other pairs than BTC / ETH. This is decoupling, since you can clearly see that tokens traded mostly in BTC / ETH are going up and down with them, whereas STEEM has a bigger inertia.
June '17, Jan '18 and recent small alt jump show heavy correlation. Im not sure I believe you :)
STEEM is the most stable coin nowadays, for sure...and, yes, you are right the decoupling of steem from BTC is the main reason.
STEEM is going to be one of the main coins of the future
Anything that points towards decoupling is good news to me! Thanks for keep us in the loop about this. It will be interesting to see how it evolves in the future, since a lot of new users are joining that have no idea about how crypto works.
I just wonder whether this an indication of how many people invest in Steem, who don't hold any other crypto. That Steem is their entry point into crypto.
I believe this is good for Steem in the long-term, not being reliant on the price movement of Bitcoin is a strong position to be in. And it's also good when Bitcoin is flat, or falling.
But I wonder what it means when Bitcoin is rising. When Bitcoin rises it tends to pull up the alt coins too. Would Steem de-coupling lessen the upside from this rise?
To a certain extent, yes.
So you could argue, in the short-to-medium term that de-coupling isn't great for Steem. I believe there's a LOT of upside to Bitcoin right now. As long as it doesn't dip below $6k again (in which case it could go much lower), I can only see Bitcoin rising and being very strong again late 2018, into 2019. It'd be nice to get a little of this upside transferring over to Steem too.
Long-term, it could be very good, but we need some short/medium term growth too.
This is relevant, this is good for steem
So you are saying Steem is going to compete to BTC on its own?
that what i can understand after reading your post.
He is saying that the price of Steem is kind of independent from Bitcoin compared to most other cryptos.
So variation in bitcoin price will not effect steem price much?
That's right. But keep in mind that only 1/3rd of Steem is traded to fiat, so BTC and other cryptos will still have a lot to say about the price. Just not as much as with other altcoins.
May be in coming years we see a complete decoupling. ...its still premature to draw a conclusion:)
@dragosroua so many ways that STEEM can benefit anyone who gets involved with it.................