To the Moon!
Steem has rocketed to the number three spot on Coin Market Cap... in two weeks. More surprisingly it hasn't fallen back to Earth and is proving to be surprisingly strong in holding third place and staying north of $3. You can see both MACD and RSI are oversold and by all appearances another leg up may be in the making:
Bear Whale?
Crypto veterans are scratching their heads - where is the bear whale? Why haven't the devs dumped the huge pre-mine and sailed off into the sunset? This sort of dump-resistant price action is extremely rare in the crypto space and a lot of money is sitting on the sidelines waiting for the dump to get in. But it hasn't happened.
It's different this time... or is it?
Steem was designed from the ground up to prevent one of the biggest problems with crypto assets - dumping and market manipulation by large stakeholders. This was accomplished partly by a large pre-mine that resulted in the majority of Steem market share being held by the core developers, who presumably will act to maximize long term value rather than short term gain.
But Steem also has a radical new feature that is proving to be a massive advantage in preventing dumping - Steem Power! Steem Power pays investors to lock up their holdings for a period of time, therefore making it attractive to hold instead of trade. And it seems to be working very, very well.
News of the recent hack spread like wildfire and the price of Steem dropped in response... but compared to hacks/bad news related to Bitcoin and Ether, Steem has basically just shrugged it off and carried on. Price is back in the high $3 range at the time of writing. For a crypto that shot up a thousand percent in a few days this is absolutely incredible.
$10 Steem
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the next stop will be $10 Steem, No. 2 on CMC and a billion-plus market cap. And I'm going to go even further out on that limb and say it will happen before the end of the year. TA is unreliable at best in thin markets, and even more so in thin crypto markets, so I'm not going to try and back any of this up with charts, bands or pretty colored lines. This is pure and complete speculation:
1. The dev team wants to take No. 2 on CMC and will keep the market very, very tight until they do.
2. User growth and content creation are going parabolic. Network effect is starting to kick in and it's looking like a Pokemon level event may bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of new users in the next few weeks.
3. Steem Power. The crypto wealthy have not yet realized they can earn a substantial yield by parking BTC in Steem Power. When they do there will be a stampede to convert - this could make a tight market much, much tighter.
4. FOMO. There are a lot of speculators waiting for the dumping. The longer Steem goes without dumping the greater the FOMO. If there isn't a dump over the weekend many on the sidelines are going to throw a little in, just in case the $3-4 was stop on the way to $10. A lot of folks throwing a little in will keep things steady until the next moonshot takes off.
5. $10 and $1B market cap is a nice psychological stopping point. Devs can take profits and the media can laud the billion-dollar social media crypto-star that is going to eat Facebook's breakfast and beat up Reddit at recess. At this point I think the speculative momentum will have run its course and organic growth will set in.
Speculate!
Let's hear what the community thinks - are we going down? Up? How far and why? Let's hear it!