We have seen the 24-hour trading volume go from $1M to hit almost $4M in all the exchanges combined. This is only 1% of the total market cap advertised at coinmarketcap.com. The reason for this low daily volume even though the price has risen over 20x over the last few weeks is that the amount of liquid STEEM is really small.
Adding up all the STEEM in the accounts showing up at steemd.com you'll get a number under 3M STEEM which is about 3% of that accounted at coinmarketcap.com. 3M STEEM is comparable to about $12M. This seems to be the actual available supply and it's actual value. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not sure on how to explore the blockchain independently at this time, a link to a tutorial on that would be greatly appreciated.