The Steem World we are in is constantly evolving and during 2019 the evolution of this world wasn't that promising. We had downvote wars that were fought between users. We had a big price dip for steem and we had a lot of people who stopped posting.
Stabilisation of the ecosystem
As of today, I would say that this negative tendency has stopped and the life on the steem blockchain has stabilized. To affirm this, I would like to use two interesting indicators.
Alexa Rank of Steemit.com
The first indicator to measure life on the steem blockchain is the Alexa Rank of steemit.com. Steemit is still the major platform of the steem blockchain with a Rank of 14'000. Steempeak is growing steadily and it's Alexa Rank is now around 48'000. The Alexa Rank is an indicator that shows how popular a website is compared to all the other websites. The higher the rank, the more popular it is. Alexa Rank is built on certain parameters like the number of visitors and the number of pages visited. It is therefore an interesting indicator to see how steem is evolving.
In the graph below you see the evolution of the Alexa Rank of Steemit.com during the last 3 months. It passed from 10'600 to 14'000. At it's best steemit was in the first 4000. This negative evolution seems however to have stopped and the rank has remained stable during the last weeks.
source: https://www.alexa.com/
Number of posts and number of authors
The second indicator to evaluate life on the steem blockchain is the evolution of the number of posts and the number of authors that are actif on steem. I take this evolution from the website https://tool.steem.world/Post/Stat.
source: https://tool.steem.world/Post/Stat
When looking at the evolution of the number of posts, we can again see a certain stabilisation, in the last weeks even a little regain of activity which I find encouraging.
Regain of activity
A part from these objectif indicators, there are also subjective aspects that can inform us about the evolution of steem and the steem ecosystem. What is nice is that there are new projects in the pipeline that are interesting:
Payment processor for steem and steem-engine tokens
The very active CTP community and its leader 
A new game in the starting blocks
Holybread a new steem based RPG Browsergame that will be launched on 27.1.2020.
Steem price spike
During the last days the price of steem has taken a very interesting journey passing from 0.14 USD to 0.22 USD in less than a day. It has been very long since we had a surprise this way round ;-)
The changes have been applied and the community has consolidated
After the much mentioned hard fork, steem had to find a new path and the userbase had to adapt to it as well. Many users left steem but the ones that remained represent a core of people that are quite comitted to steem. I see encouraging signs for the development of steem and I think that we will soon start to grow again!
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