How many active accounts the Steem blockchain actually has?
We have all hear the number on the users posting, with some speculation like 2k daily, 10k monthly etc.
To answer properly this question, first we need to have a definition for an active user.
What does the active user actually represent?
In the good old Bitcoin days, users or wallet addresses were able to do only one thing on the blockchain. Transfers value/coins. Then comes the smart contracts, Ethereum, and finally Steem.
On the Steem blockchain, users can do a lot more than just transfer coins.
Here are some of the actions:
- Post and comment
- Vote
- Transfer coins
- Make Custom JSON transactions
- Reading
That last activity reading is actually not stored on the blockchain and it’s a bit neglected for this type of analysis. I will try to provide some numbers on this, cause it is worth noting it is the highest activity of them all. That is what makes more add income, that the giant social media are fighting for.
When we look at some of the popular ranking websites for crypto dapps we can see that they are ranking the dApps by transactions. At least that is what is wirten. Here is a screenshot from the stateofdapps.
https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings
Daily Active Users, or DAU (unique source addresses in transaction to DApp contracts)
The steemapps.com crated by 
DAU are unique users over a specific timeframe, who are either transferring to the app, creating custom_jsons of the app or creating posts/comments with the app. Important: The real number of users can be much higher with specific apps due to missing data, which we're not able to fetch.
This is a bit more accurate definition than the one on stateofdapps. Plus, they have put in a bit of a disclaimer in the definition itself. That’s is ok. Looking at the number on stateofdapps and steemapps, most probably stateofthedapps is getting the numbers from steemdapps, just they have a different definition in.
As stated above SteeApps is taking in consideration the following activities:
- Post and comment
- Transfer coins
- Make Custom JSON transactions
One of the most important action on the Steem blockchain, voting is not counted here. After all, Steem sometimes is referred as the upvote of the internet.
Number of Users/Account by Action
Now as we have seen the different action lets take a look at the number of users for all of them.
Posting – Number of Accounts that Posts or Comment
Here is the chat of the number of accounts that made a post, starting from May 2019.
Note: This is a number for the account that posted, not a number of posts per day. One account can make more than one post per day.
The number of accounts that made a daily post on May 1st, 2019 was 6631. After this the number has been going down until September 2019 when it reached around 4000 daily accounts. In the last months this number has been in the range between 3500 and 4000 with a slight increase in the number of accounts posting in the last period.
Next the number of daily accounts commenting.
As for the posts, the trend is similar here as well. Although it is noticeable that less accounts are commenting per day than posting. Starting from around 4k accounts in May 2019, finishing with 2700 accounts in February 2020.
Voting - Number of Users/Account that Vote
How about the number of daily accounts that vote. What is there number. After all the voting feature on the Steem blockchain is at its core. Rewards are distributed via votes. Here is the chart.
The number of unique daily accounts that vote is much higher than the number of accounts that post or comment. It started with more than 40k accounts voting in May 2019, ending with around 30k accounts that vote daily. Some of this account may be bots and vote on auto, but still this is quite a decent number of accounts.
Transfers – Number of Accounts that are making transfers
What about the basic crypto activity? Transferring value. How many users are making daily transactions? Here is the chart.
There is quite a significant drop in this category, from more 10k daily accounts transferring in May 2019 (a weird spike to 14k) to 5200 accounts in February 2020. Not totally sure but I think that the large number of account transacting in May 2019 is due to the higher activity on the gambling dApps at the time.
Custom JSON – Number of Accounts that are making custom JSON transactions
The custom JSON activity has been on a rise on the Steem blockchain, mainly because of the games using this functionality.
How is the number of unique daily users on this activity?
We can notice a trend of slow increase in the number of the unique accounts that are making custom JSON transactions daily. The number of accounts making custom JSON dropped from more than 10k in May 2019 to around 8500 in June, July. Since than it has been slowly increasing reaching more than 10k again.
Nice round 10k unique accounts that are making custom JSONs daily.
Overall number of active accounts
Now that we have seen the breakdown in account making different activities, lets take a look at the overall active accounts.
First the chart on accounts by activity.
This is a chart for number of unique daily accounts by activity on February 15, 2020.
As we can notice the numbers of accounts that vote is the largest, with almost 30k accounts voting per day, next are the accounts that make custom JSONs with around 10k, followed by the transactions 5k, and accounts that post 3.8k and comment 2.7k.
If we combine the above and make an overall number of unique daily accounts making one of the activities above that number for February 15, 2020 is 36,973.
Looking back from the start of 2020 with data points twice per month the chart for overall Daily Active Users looks like this.
A slight drop from 36k to 31k, and back to 36k.
It would be interesting to see the number of monthly active users as well. That is another great indicator. Maybe around the 100k?
Readers
Since the main App build on the Steem blockchain, Steemit, is a blogging platform the obvious question is how many readers it has. The numbers presented above are about authors, curators, gamers, etc… users that actually interact with the blockchain with some action.
The number of readers is not stored on the blockchain. The interesting thing is that there is more than one frontend to the blockchain, no there is no one single point of entrance to count.
According to https://hypestat.com/ the steemit.com web has around 220k unique daily visitors. Steempeak has around 50k. The others interfaces and tribes have some more. Some of them may overlap but I would give a rough estimate of 250k daily overall daily visitors. Have in mind this is very rough estimate.
A note on the number of active users
I see a lot of comments like, the crypto X has 100k telegram members. Crypto Y has a 500k telegram members. Comparing Telegram members with Daily Active Users, or even Monthly Active Users is misleading. I’m a member of a bunch of telegram groups and a lot of them I haven’t visited in months.
On Steem we have an extremely active and dedicated user base. They are voting, posting, playing games on a daily level. Most of all they are interacting and connecting with each other and making friends and business relations. Using and offering services, developing a new economy. They are sort of workers on the Steem blockchain. They are ready to use and test new products and dApps on a daily level. Because of this we have seen the growth of Splinterlands, (most likely the best game in crypto), video sharing platforms like 3Speak, Dtube, countless tribes from Steem Engine, and many apps more coming up daily (Holy Bread, SteemCity). All we need is a little push 😊.
Posted via Steemleo