Steem (STEEM) is a top performing cryptocurrency over the past twenty-four hours. The coin is up a little over 38% across the period and currently trades for a market capitalization of a little over $1.5 billion. The primary driver behind this upside run is an increase in speculative attention and a boost in sentiment on the back of a fresh (and, indeed, the first) professional ratings report that spanned a large number of cryptocurrencies and that hit press midsession US on Wednesday. While many in the space have disagreed with the interpretation put forward as part of the report, holders of STEEM likely aren’t complaining, given that this coin was one of the few that actually received a highly favorable report.
The agency in question is Weiss and the report can be found here.
For anybody not familiar with Weiss, it’s a ratings agency that began in 1971 and is the self-proclaimed nation’s leading independent rating agency of financial institutions. It assigns letter grades to about 55,000 institutions and investments, including nearly all of the US’s insurance companies, banks, credit unions, stocks, ETFs and mutual funds. It also (and this is important) never accepts compensation of any kind from the companies or entities it rates.
STEEM Daily Chart
Anyway, it’s the first financial rating agency to put forward a cryptocurrency based report and the response has been mixed.
Bitcoin, for example, picked up a C+, while Ripple picked up a C and Ethereum received a B.
STEEM, on the other hand, received a B-.
Here’s the justification:
“(STEEM) enjoys a relatively good balance of moderate strength in nearly all the key factors considered along with a social network feature.”
So what’s the deal? Why did STEEM outperform some of the incumbents in the space?
Well, for anyone new to this one, STEEM is the cryptocurrency that underpins the Steemit ecosystem. Steemit is a social network and content creation type platform that allows anyone who has an account to create and publish content for the consumption of other users.
It’s free to use for creators and users are able to use the blockchain based technology that underpins the platform to reward other users monetarily if they apprecitate the content that they are creating and sharing with the community. Think of it as a sort of hybrid between Medium, Reddit and Facebook.
Anyway, back to the ratings.
As noted, Weiss sees STEEM as superior to many of the coins in the space based on the balance of its features in line with the fact that it’s used to power a social network. While this seems like a bit of a loose statement, at core we agree with the agency.
Sure, STEEM doesn’t have the billions of dollars of infrastructure in place that bitcoin does. And sure, Steemit doesn’t have the enterprise partnerships with commercial behemoths that Ripple does. It’s also nowhere near Ethereum in terms of utility.
In its own niche, however, it’s an incumbent. In a very short period of time the company, the platform and the cryptocurrency that underpins them both have been able to dominate the social media side of the sector and establish a large, solid and very loyal base of users.
There’s also a healthy amount of speculative attention behind the coin.
But here’s what really matters – this is a coin that’s designed (indeed, one of its core functions is) to exchange hands. When it comes to long-term value potential, utility is key and this is one of the biggest strengths that STEEM has going for it right now.
So what comes next?
Now it’s all about STEEM living up to its rating. We can only see Steemit continuing to expand its user base and – as it does – expand both the base of STEEM holders and the transaction utility of the coin.