The price of STEEM is on fire. Since the beginning of last month, it went from the $.85 to bear $1.50. I am sure this has people walking on cloud 9. An 80% jump in a month will get anyone excited even in the cryptocurrency world.
Which brings up the question, what changed?
The answer is absolutely nothing. This blockchain is on the same path it was on since I got here. At the end of the day, people need to realize that the price of the token means little at this point.
As I wrote about, STEEM is under priced because it is not well known. I even put together an entire article about this which can be read here:
Steem is a specialized blockchain that is not quite two yeas old. When a chain is specialized, designed for a specific purpose, it requires more from its developers. There is no the flexibility to go in any direction they desire. The content creation market is what steem caters to. This means the apps and systems in place need to fulfill the expectations of what these people will desire. This is radically different than throwing out a chain where people can develop coins to do whatever they want. On steem, there are some built-in features which require testing and adapting (curation reward system as an example).
All my writing focuses upon the development that is taking place on the blockchain. I do this for the simple reason that I believe, at present, the development is the most important thing. It is easy to focus upon price action yet steem is not ready to present itself to the market. There will come a time when the buyers realize what steem is packing, but that time is not now. So concerning oneself with price is not necessary. It is a reflection of very little.
Here is a chart from block-tivity. As you can see, Steem has one of the most powerful blockchains. Please notice how it is ranked second in average transactions per day. Until recently, it was first yet was surpassed by ETH and its cartoon character.
One thing to note is the CUI. This is a measure of how hard the blockchain is working from the average daily transactions. Steem, at 690K average, is not even breathing hard. This amount of traffic does not even move the needle. Now take a look at ETH. At 713K transaction, it is like a man after walking 10 miles in the desert; it is pooped. A cartoon character overloaded the ETH network. Yet this token is close to $500.
Scaling up is an issue the bitcoin trio (or however many there are this week), ETH, and LTC are all dealing with. Steem can handle 10,000 transactions per second without a problem and, from what I read, has the ability to push 100K. That starts to move it into the Visa neighborhood.
Transaction speed is just one criteria and please do not mistake what I am saying. BTC, ETH, and LTC are not dead networks. I am not like some who believe that their lack of speed will kill them. To start, they will figure out how to increase the speed of things. Secondly, there are many transactions that do not require speed and are perfectly okay taking an hour or two. My point here is that steem has the horsepower out of the box. So while developers on those other chains are working on scaling, the steem developers can focus on more important matters.
Over the last month, we saw updates in both D.Tube and Zappl which improved things. $20M was raised to help fund the development of the steem platform. Steembay opened up and started holding auctions (commerce) on the steem blockchain. The number of users who signed up here increased. Utopian.io released some stuff that I do not understand.
Overall, the blockchain is moving ahead just fine regardless of what the price does. At some point, price action catches up especially in the crypto world. Nevertheless, those who follow what is going on with this blockchain will sleep better at night knowing that your money is safe in STEEM. It is easy to get sucked in by the Chicken Little's of the world. They are quiet now since the price moved up so much yet, when you look at it, nothing changed from a week ago.
And that was my point all along.
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Pictures by Google Images.
