I'm a huge believer in Steemit, and I wanted to take some time to outline my case for why I think Steem is incredibly undervalued at the moment, and the potential it has to go up in the near future and beyond.

Apart from just being an awesome platform, with a great community (of course!🚀) when we look at the numbers there are some powerful fundamentals behind Steemit that I think, at this point, make it ready to go parabolic at any time.

Steemit.com

Firstly, according to Alexa, a website that tracks website traffic, statistics and analytics, Steemit.com is already ranked number 2,190 out of all the websites in the world, and 1,585 in the United States.

As you can see from the chart, Steemit.com has been steadily rising up the rankings. This time last year it was only ranked number 13,373.

If we look at the growth of new users, the numbers are equally impressive.

This is a chart put together by @arcange, a blog well worth following for daily updates on Steemit statistics. We can see that in the last year, the number of users has grown from about 100,000 to nearly 450,000, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Another metric in which Steemit is racing ahead is transaction volume, as we can see in this next chart, again by @arcange.

Steemit actually processes more transactions per day than any other blockchain. As of writing, the number is 660,681, compared 308,612 for Bitcoin, and 494,176 for Ethereum. But transactions per day on Steemit have been as high as 900,000 in the last couple of weeks, which would be more than Bitcoin and Ethereum combined.

These are compelling numbers, and speak to the level of growth in Steemit.com as a website and the Steem blockchain as a platform.

Steem Power

The next factor in this equation is Steem Power. Aside from the economic benefits of holding your Steem as Steem Power, which I have spoken to in my post https://steemit.com/steemit/@adamantine/why-steemit-is-better-than-holding-a-masternode, something which I think most newer users probably aren't aware of is that Steemit actually has user levels.

These are the @steemitboard levels, and to put this into perspective, let's take a look at how these levels correspond to the number of user accounts.

76.4% of accounts fall in the grey bar, the Dead Fish, and have been inactive in the last 30 days, and are accounts with little to no Steem Power. Accounts in the red tab, the Red Fish have up to 999,999 Vests, and account for 17.1% of the total active users.

Things really gets interesting though when you look at the Minnow levels and above. At the time of writing, 1M Vests equals 486.467 Steem, which you can buy for only $465.99. Now this investment of $465.99 buys you a place in the top 1.2% of all active accounts on Steemit. That is a very small amount to pay right now for a position of influence on a platform with the potential of Steemit. When you go up another level, to the Dolphin, an investment of $4659.90 buys you a place in the top 0.24%, and so on up.

Now this is with a Steem price of $0.95, but with a Steem price of $2.50, or $4.30, which we have seen in the very recent past, and which we could see again at any time, these numbers become much less affordable, and out of reach for the average person or even the average small investor.

Steem

Where this all comes together, and the factor that I think is the ticking timebomb with Steemit, is the available supply of Steem. When we look on CMC it appears that there is a circulating supply of around 245 million Steem, and the market cap of $235 million is calculated based on that number.

But this really isn't the whole picture. If we go over to https://steemdb.com and check the numbers, we can see that out of the nearly 260 million Steem that are in circulation, an incredible 190 million are locked up in Steem Power! That's 73% of the total supply that cannot be released for 3 months, and is effectively unavailable. This leaves under 70 million free Steem to buy, and around 3.3 million SBD.

If we were to do the numbers based on the actual available liquid Steem, the market cap would only be $68 million, placing Steem somewhere around number 75 in the CMC rankings.

If there were to ever be a run on Steem, the consequences for the Steem price would be absolutely seismic.

I hope I've given you something to think about, and presented a compelling argument for the value of Steem. As always this is not investment advice, only my thoughts and observations.

Please let me know what you think, does Steem have the potential that these numbers would suggest?