The price of steem has been pretty beaten up, but that isn't the entire story...
We all know that steem has been kicked pretty hard ever since peaking in January of 2018.
It's currently down some 99% from it's all time highs.
Where it once briefly touched $9 and now currently sits at $.13.
Most of the altcoin and crypto market was beat up in similar fashion, though steem has still been beat up worse than most.
However, that isn't the whole story...
Yes the price is important, it is very important in fact in regards to keeping the project functioning. However, the project isn't quite as beat up as badly as the price decline implies.
Why do I say that?
Looking at a recent article from coinclarity.com we can see that steem is a lot more popular than many of its peers, despite the price decline.
In fact, since January of 2018, Steem rates as the 4th most searched coin in all of crypto.
Let that sink in a bit...
Steem currently ranks as the 80th most valuable crypto project, yet ranks as the 4th most popular since January of 2018?
Something sounds a little off about that...
(Source: https://coinclarity.com/using-google-trends-to-identify-popular-altcoins/)
What's more...
The 3 coins ahead of it are Bitcoin Cash, Tezos, and XRP.
Coins with significantly higher market caps than little ol steem.
Even king Bitcoin is ranked 5th, right behind steem.
Here is the list of all the coins that qualified using their ranking criteria (coin must be within top 100 on CM and be at least 2 years old):
Aeternity (AE) – 8
Basic Attention Token (BAT) – 14
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – 30
Bitcoin Diamond (BCD) – 4
BitShares (BTS) – 5
Bytecoin (BYTE) – 2
Cardano (ADA) – 15
Decentraland (MANA) – 15
Decred (DCR) – 5
DigiByte (DGB) – 6
DigixDAO (DGD) – 2
Dogecoin (DOGE) – 11
Electroneum (ETN) – 7
Ethereum (ETH) – 9
Ethereum Classic (ETC) – 14
IOST (IOST) – 3
Litecoin (LTC) – 11
MaidSafeCoin (MAID) – 15
MonaCoin (MONA) – 4
Monero (XMR) – 13
OmiseGO (OMG) – 5
Qtum (QTUM) – 3
Siacoin (SC) – 1
Steem (STEEM) – 19
Tezos (XTZ) – 28
VeChain (VET) – 9
XRP (XRP) – 25
Zcash (ZEC) – 9
Zilliqa – 4
As you can see, steem has the 4th highest ranking which indicates people are searching for it.
More from that article can be seen here btw:
https://steemit.com/steem/@jrcornel/google-trends-says-steem-is-a-top-4-coin
The price will catch up over time
Given the above info, I would bet that the price will eventually reflect these trends seen on google.
Projects ahead of it with no users and no one actively searching for will eventually go away.
The projects that do have users and continue to develop use cases will rise like cream to top.
As long as steem continues to be one of those there is no reason why the price won't eventually reflect that.
I think we will see steem start to rise in 2020 and hopefully continue to do so as most of the vaporware ahead of it goes the way of the dodo.
Stay informed my friends.
-Doc