Steem price is highly affected by market pressure. It doesn't help the price when exchanges are not supporting STEEM wallets. We just got out of a month and a half of broken STEEM wallets from the two top exchanges. It is downright shameful how bad the support has been.

STEEM price can go up with participation and break away from market dominance. A large user base can overwhelm the market dominance of Bitcoin. To do that, we need to onboard massive amounts of users at a rate that is orders of magnitude greater than what we have now.

The lack liquid steem can gauge users desire to hold steem in SP. If we see a downward trend of the liquid steem, then the new supply is not keeping up with SP creation. This would indicate that there will be a shortage of available steem and price could go up.

I hope this helps.