Steem price can be increased in two ways.
The first method is sustainable - to have more users
The second method is to artificially pump it up:
If someone starts playing with the market and invest 5 - 10,000,000 dollars in a single day,
the price could rise for about 0,1 $.
And here is the problem, who has 10.000.000 $ now?
According to some recent stats, about 100,000,000 Steem is in liquid form.
In other words. about 30-40 M$.
In order to pump the price, we need something like a peristaltic pump
A constant flow of money. As 
There must be something superb on the horizon in order to pump it up, and I don't see anything spectacular at this point
Another interesting event we can see in this Figure, do you see the sharp drop 8 months ago?
Do you remember what happened in October 2018?
Hard Fork, unfulfilled promises and technical difficulties for several days.