Pending Hard Fork and the market is GONE???
I looked at the code changes, and it looks like the liquidity reward will require orders stay on the book for at least an hour in order to count toward the liquidity bonus.
The fact that the market page is now missing on Steemit.com, and the fact that the liquidity leaders seem to be dropping leads me to believe that most of the cheater bots were submitting their orders through the site, not through compiled clients.
With the hard fork about 7 hours away, there is a rapidly decreasing window to cheat the system and make self trades through the client itself. At current prices that's about a $28k reward for someone to get that going.
Not sure why the market is gone but I personally think the new liquidity reward system is ridiculous and more favorable to people who already had a lot of Steems, I've been making market this entire afternoon and all the other top 10 liquidity leaders are just trading against themselves by taking out me and then a large order they placed previously...