As of May 2017, there are more than 170,000 Steem accounts. After an initial public beta for which no payments were made, the hard fork on July 4th, 2016 saw $1,300,000 of STEEM and Steem Dollars paid out to Steemit users.[8]
The exchange rate of STEEM compared to Bitcoin rose continuously during July 2016, peaking at a price of over 4 US dollars.[4] In most of July 2016, Steem had the third largest market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies monitored by the website Coinmarketcap.com, reaching a first notable peak at July 20th, with about 405 million US dollars.[9] As of May 25th, 2016 its market cap is 258 million United States dollars.
Steemit has been described as a novel and "disruptive blockchain-based media community" by Adam Hayes (Investopedia) in July 2016.[4] It got media coverage in cryptocurrency- and business-related media.[10][11] Author Neil Strauss, a Steemit member, wrote an article for Rolling Stone calling its reward distribution "particularly clever" and echoing the sentiment of its disruptive potential.[12]
