2017 has been an awesome year for Steemit. The number of account set up in 2017 so far is 346015 and the total vest owned by these accounts is 59.37B. However Steemit does struggle with a retention problem.

The price of Steem has also had an interesting year. With the price being as low as 9 cent back in Feb and a high of $1.70 in Sept.

Steemit like any other block chain, relies on liquidity, and much of the liquidity is provided by users of the Steemit platform.

The aim of this analysis was to find the investment ratio per active user registered on Steemit.

Lets look at the Data

I have connected to the Steemsql database held and managed by @

Data was pulled on the 30/11/2017

The chart below shows a breakdown of the number of account set up each day this year. We can see from May, the number of new accounts each day really took off

The pie chart shows the vesting shares owned by the month the account was created. In the blue is accounts set up in September currently own 27% of the vesting shares held by all account set up in 2017

However I was curious to see what percentage of accounts set up in 2017 were for September. So I first plotted by month, the % of new accounts set up, v’s the % of vesting shares held by accounts set up that month.

Finally I plotted the Average Vests held by each accounts sorted by the month the account was created.

In March 2.41% of the total 2017 account were set. This 2.41% owns 17.32% of all vesting shares held by account set up in 2017. The average vest held by each account set up in March is 1.23M. That’s more than 3 times that of accounts set up in February.

In April we had 2.24% of 2017 accounts set up and these own 6.23% of vesting shares held by accounts set up in 2017

In September we had 12.77% of the 2017 account set up and these own 27.43% of the vesting shares held.

Lets have a look and see which accounts set up in 2017 have the most vesting shares held in Steemit

There are a number of ways to increase or decrease the vesting share you have in Steemit. You can earn them with author and posting rewards. You can win them with contests. You can purchase them, or you can sell them.

The next step in this analysis was to connect to the transfers table and see how many of the accounts set up in 2017 have invested into steemit over the last two months.

I used the following SQL query

SELECT * FROM TxTransfers (NOLOCK) WHERE [from] in ('blocktrades', 'bittrex', 'changelly', 'openledger-dex', 'poloniex') and timestamp >= CONVERT(datetime,'10/01/2017') and timestamp< CONVERT(datetime,'12/01/2017')

The aim of this query was to get an indication of how many steemits set up each month in 2017 have invested $$ by purchasing Steem or SBD on an exchange and sending it to steemit

Let me explain the visualization above.

The green bar column chart is the total Steem transferred into steemit via one all of the exchanges listed above, broken down by the month in which the user signed up to Steemit. Beside this we see the total amount of 6310.85K Steem transferred to accounts from an exchange for the months of October and November.

The pink bar chart at the bottom represents the total SBD transferred into steemit via one all of the exchanges listed above, broken down by the month in which the user signed up to Steemit. Beside this we see the total amount of 563.47 SBD transferred to accounts from an exchange for the months of October and November.

In between these two charts is the number of accounts that made a transfer into steemit broken down by the month in which the user set up on steemit. The total unique accounts that transferred into Steemit in October and November was 5634. That is only 1.6% of accounts set up in 2017.

The table on the left shows the accounts sorted by the total amount transferred into the account from one of the exchanges. From here we can see who the big investors were overall, and below by each exchange.

We can further filter this visualisation by exchange

The value of 1.6% of accounts making an investment in steemit in October and November is not a accurate reflection of the number of account set up in 2017 that also invested into steemit in 2017.

To get an actuate reflection I changed the query to

SELECT * FROM TxTransfers (NOLOCK) WHERE [from] in ('blocktrades', 'bittrex', 'changelly', 'openledger-dex', 'poloniex') and timestamp >= CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2017')

The results can be seen in the visualization below.

Now we can see that 16K accounts set up in 2017 have invested into Steemit via an exchange. This is almost 5% which is a much healthier value.

Considering Retention

Retention has been identified as a problem by both others and myself on the Steemit Platform.

Only looking at the account set up in 2017:

In the last 45 days, 61,517 unique accounts have posted on Steemit, and 108,652 accounts have voted. If we now take our 16K accounts that have invested into Steemit as a percentage of the active voting accounts in the last 45 day, then we are up to 14% of active accounts set up in 2017 are also investors.

Conclusion

A continuous streem of investors are required to keep steemit stable and liquid. The Steem invested into Steemit is not the only steem out there and there are other investors that hold steem or SBD in wallets and exchanges.

16K new investors have invested 22.6M in steem and 1.9M in SBD in 2017

I previous read somewhere that Steemit needs 10% of users to be liquid. I don’t know where I read it so I cannot give you the source. If this is the case then Steemit is reaching its target for the % of user that become investors. I am not sure however that they are seeing the investment level they had hoped for in terms of the current price of Steem

Having looked over the data above, I have also noted the some of the accounts set up in 2017 that hold a large amount of vests, did not make a transfer into steemit via one of the listed exchanges.

@Mrdelegation for example. In some cases Steem and SBD have been transferred directly from other accounts in Steemit. For these accounts, although they did not make a direct investment, they are still providing liquidity to Steemit by not powering down and cashing out.





Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors