The price of STEEM suddenly jumped from $0.86 to $1.10 a few hours ago. I has receded a bit since then but we can say that we're at $1 rather than below it now. The all-time-high of STEEM is about $8 in January this year. Shortly before that SBD had spiked to about $14.
The market cap of Steem is about $290 million right now. What is the market cap of some of the leading public blockchain projects? Bitcoin's market cap is currently $115 billion, Ethereum's market cap is $24 billion and Ripple is third at $21 billion. EOS and Stellar Lumens are worth about $5 billion each. EOS has a market cap of about 20 times larger than that of Steem!
Let's look at the number of transactions per 24 h, market cap, ratio of transactions per day to market cap, and percentage of capacity in use relative to maximum capacity of some of the top public blockchains (relative to that of Bitcoin):
| # | Blockchain | Trx/d | Mkt Cap | Ind | % of cap in use |
| 1. | Bitshares | ~1,600,000 | $0.3 billion | 1.149 | 0.14% |
| 2. | EOS | ~1,123,000 | $5.2 billion | 46 | 0.09% |
| 3. | Steem | ~1,033,000 | $0.3 billion | 751 | 0.09% |
| 4. | Bitcoin | ~538,000 | $114 billion | 1.0 | 77.85% |
| 5. | Ethereum | ~470,000 | $24 billion | 4 | 100%+ |
Source: https://blocktivity.info/
If actual use is considered to be the main source of value of a blockchain, then it is clear that Steem is very undervalued at the moment. Steem was designed to be a Proof-of-Stake chain from the start as opposed to Ethereum whose consensus mechanism is planned to be rewritten as a PoS as opposed to Proof-of-Work which is what it is now. That'll be a massive undertaking.
The total market cap of cryptocurrencies about $222 billion at the moment. It was $800+ billion. I don't think it's unrealistic at all to expect STEEM to go to the tens of dollars in the next bull run. The ecosystem is growing at a rapid clip with decentralized alternatives to popular services cropping up.
$10
If the price of STEEM were $10, the market cap would be about $2.7 billion at the current number of STEEM in circulation (the virtual supply is a bit higher as SBD is a debt instrument backed by STEEM). That's about one tenth of the current market cap of Ethereum and in the same general category with Reddit whose value is about $1.8 billion. Reddit had about 1.6 billion unique visitors last July.
$100
If the value of STEEM were $100, its market cap would be $27 billion or the same as that of Ethereum today or about three times as much as the market cap of Pinterest, valued $12 billion in the summer of 2017 and having 175 million monthly users.
$1000
If the value of STEEM were $1000, its market cap would be $270 billion which is about twice the current market cap of Bitcoin of half of that of Facebook. Facebook is a well-oiled machine whose business is selling advertising space targeted at a very high level of precision thanks to extracting every bit of information from its user base by data mining everything they do. Facebook has about two billion users and about 1.5 billion daily users.
What was surprising how huge the differences in market cap were in relation to the number of monthly users. The key to a high valuation is clearly not just the amount of traffic generated but how efficiently their activities are analysed for the purposes of targeted advertising. In case of Steem, third parties will most likely emerge to analyse the blockchain specializing in providing app developers information on which to base their advertising decisions.