At the beginning of 2018, talk about the price of STEEM dominated. When will it reach $100? When will it moon again?
Throughout 2018, there were enough mentions of the $10 STEEM. At the end of 2018, with possibly the final downward push of this bear trend, the price of STEEM came into discussions again.
I don't hear it as often. Maybe I'm not reading in the 'right' places. Or maybe the people who were mainly concerned about the price of STEEM are gone or dormant. They will be back on the way up.
What we hear now is way more healthy for organic growth. Talk about usage, about communities, about development, and about future. And more than talk - action.
Not that these discussions were absent in the past. They were however often overwhelmed by those involving price or about the broken rewards system.
Rewards are something great for Steem, that makes us feel appreciated for our contribution, however important or insignificant it may be. Can they be improved? Of course! Nothing is perfect!
But what makes us powerful is that our dApps have real and constant users, and that our community is strong. That shows clearly in the State of the Dapps, but also on Twitter, where we dominate much larger blockchains, taken by the market cap of the coins.
But... price matter to others. Or rather the market cap, which is influenced by price.
We might think people are watching what Steem is doing and patiently waiting for us to do something (but what?), before they unload their big pockets full of fiat.
We should not count on that. I talked with a few people who manage millions of USD in client money and who deal exclusively with crypto. Not huge, but hey, there are still millions of USD! When I mentioned STEEM, they made me repeat, and clearly had no idea what I'm talking about. They are solely focused on top market cap coins. We need to get higher on that indicator too, to be on their radar, even if to me usage stats for dApps is more relevant.