Steem and Steemit are having a pretty good time right now. Steem just gained about $600m of market cap thanks to frantic trading in Korea. $280m of that $351m volume was Korean Won to Steem. The Steem Dollar is also popular there, but not rising much at the moment. I'm wondering if it can ever return to the $1 peg. That seems unlikely as long as it's this popular with speculators. For now I don't see as much more than speculation. I know it got a little boost from the Weiss report, but the trend started before then. We need concrete developments to really get people excited.
The Steemit site is still doing really well according to Alexa. Since the beginning of the year it was climbed 500 places on the worldwide chart. I seems to have peaked in the US for now. It dipped under 500, but has fallen since.
Hypestat exposes more of the country data. It's most popular in Korea where it's fairly steady at just under 170th. Nigeria, Netherlands and Belgium like it too. I would expect Germany to do better considering how many Germans I know are on here.
I'm wondering what affects performance in different countries. Is it a cultural thing? A friend in India says there are issues with their government and cryptocurrency, but then Korea has been clamping down. I know we have some very advocates of Steemit in Nigeria and Venezuela. Is their influence having an effect?
So far there has not been a massive, coordinated marketing effort to get the word out about Steemit. I believe the team are waiting for Hardfork 0.20.0 to kick in. They need to be able to handle hundreds of thousands of new accounts without having to delegate to all of them and I understand the changes would allow that, but I don't fully comprehend how it all works. I expect someone could explain it to me. I'm fine with technology and algorithms, but the economics of Steem seem beyond me. I trust that the bright people behind it are finding ways to make it all work. There's discussion on those issues if you want to see what is being said. It would help if the team fed us more information on progress. We just get cryptic updates like this one from 
I expect all this is being discussed in various places, e.g. Discord and Steemit Chat, but I haven't had time to keep up with those. I try to follow people who will post relevant news.
Feel free to share what you know in the comments. I have a growing following who may see it there.
I remain optimistic about Steemit. If the team can deliver the hardfork and features like communities then it has a great future. What we are seeing now is just a glimpse of the possibilities it offers.
Steem on.
I'll buy guitar picks for Steem Dollars
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