Steemitians are thinking a lot why their favorite coin STEEM being one of the fastest (3 seconds confirmation) and scalable (10K transactions per minute), lacks the market cap (only 32 in CoinMarketCap) while the alleged scamcoin BitConnect have market cap of almost $1B. Fellow @ats-david has written a nice blog "Why Does Steem Lag in a Bull Market for Cryptocurrencies?" which trended the whole day in Steemit. His argument is that we are branding the STEEM wrong way. For example, STEEM is advertised by Steemit Inc. as money maker for content creators which may attract greedy people not crypto-investors. He proposed that STEEM should be marketed as the fastest blockchain with highest scalability. He also proposed that Steemit Inc. should burn 50 million of their holdings to reduce the supply to gain trust of investors. He also thinks that Steemit Inc. should do a guerrilla marketing to attract investors.
I can't agree more. However, I also think some other issues are also hampering STEEM's growth. Here are issues I think we need to fix to rule the top of the list in marketcaps:
I believe there is an exchange issue with STEEM. STEEM is only traded with 15 pairs in less than 10 exchanges. It is quite hard to get a large amount of STEEM with ease. For example, STEEM suddenly becomes a super popular coin, everyone wants STEEM. Now the problem is how to get a large amount of STEEM with ease. One way is to get it from bittrex. For which you need enhanced KYC which many investors think as a hassle. The second and forth largest ones: Poloniex and HitBTC have disabled transfers. I think that setting up STEEM in a exchage has a major technical difficulty: proof is regular outage of transfers from Poloniex and HitBTC. Therefore, Steemit Inc. need to provide support or push exchanges to maintain transfers up-to-date . Also, they need to work aggressively to add STEEM in big exchanges. Only fellow steemitian @zappl seems to be taking some actions.
Another issue is to how to solve massive scale sign-up issue. Now one gets a large amount of STEEM, he/she wants to transfer STEEM to an wallet (steemit account). It takes days even weeks to get approved. Around 1000s accounts are approved these days. However, when 10K or 100K people want to join, that will be a debacle for current signup system. However, there are services with Anomsteem or SteemCreate, but they are pay-for service that may not interest large number of new users.
Now think of a scenario, a user joined steemit and write his first post, a very long one and good one. A whale (e.g. with 200K delegated SP) voted him 10 cents and vote $30 on his own thoughtless comment "Welcome to Steemit". How the new Steemitian will feel about this platform and what lesson she/he will learn from this. We need to solve these holes in the system. We have a discord channel for solving these blatant abuses. However, they are rampant and I have seen whales posting 8 posts daily with two sentences and free image each earning $50. I have seen few thoughtless comment with $85. My personal solution is that Steemit Inc. should delegate 1-5M STEEMs to few moderators with good conscious to handle these kinds of abuse. Few whales fight these kinds of abuses but there is no incentive for them to continue longer.
STETM is a great blockchain and it is fundamentally better than top 30 coins. However, before SMT and community lunch, we need to address these issues. I truly believe the STEEM community and developers are working hard to see their favorite coin succeed sooner than later.
Thanks for reading.
@riseofth
Cryptominer since 2013, occasional trader and tech blogger