Hey Everyone!! I know you've been enjoying this inflated rewards pool as much as I have!! We've seen payouts rise well over 40% in the past several days. It's been incredible to see the pool fill up with so much STEEM.
The rewards pool is filled with almost 300k more STEEM than it usually is, which is simply incredible. It's so cool to watch this unfold.
I was watching the rewards pool last night with a close eye for 2 main reasons:
- We were bound to hit 1 million STEEM
- The rewards pool was also bound to start an immediate reversal right after hitting 1 million STEEM
As you can see from this picture, we got to 1 million STEEM in the pool!
But as I said in point 2, the rewards pool was bound to start reversing. You can see in this next picture that the rewards pool is ~5,000 STEEM less (taken a few hours AFTER the one above):
So what does this all mean?
The rewards pool inflated significantly due to the decreased activity on the blockchain directly after HF20. People couldn't post for 1 day and then for 5 days following that, they could upvote (because voting power was reset).
So there was almost an entire payout period (7 days) that went by without anybody being able to earn rewards. This caused the pool of STEEM to build and build and build.
It built itself to 1 million STEEM, but 7 days from yesterday was when people were able to start posting and earning rewards again.
Thus, people are now claiming their rewards out of the inflated rewards pool and it's causing the pool to deflate back towards its equilibrium.
While it would be amazing (and I would certainly love it) if the pool remained inflated, it simply is going to return to that equilibrium over the next few days.
It's been a wild ride, but fun to experience. I hope you all enjoyed a nice little bonus check from the Steem blockchain!! I sure did!