The number one reason the price of steem is surging is what happened over Christmas and New Year.

Thousands of people started to use steemit for the first time, abandoning Facebook and other blogging sites. Word is getting out.

You can see the changes by reading @penguinpablo’s recent blogs. Here is one of his charts which demonstrates that:

In the above chart you can see a 50% rise in active users in just a couple of weeks.

Why does that affect the price of steem?

Answer: Vanity.

Steem is to bloggers what lipstick is to women. It’s a vanity asset. When you have it, people look at you. If you have lots of steem, they read your blogs.

You only have to look at the hundreds of replies I got on my recent blogs to know it is true. If I like a comment it is worth alot of money to the commentator. Lots more people read my blogs because I have lots of steempower.

Steem has utility as a vanity asset. It is useful to all bloggers. The more bloggers we have on steemit, the more people want to own steem (to get steempower).

Getting steem listed on new exchanges

The developers are discussing the listing of steem with a number of exchanges. There is no news yet, but they are hopeful. If listed on a major exchange, it would be much easier to buy steem as an investment without having to open an account with Bittrex.

There are several other reasons why steem should go up which I listed in my blog of a week ago.
https://steemit.com/steem/@swissclive/steem-could-easily-rise-10x-today-s-price-within-a-few-months-it-should-perform-better-than-bitcoin-steem-price-compared-to

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