Most of people, even in crypto space, are not aware how efficient Steem blockchain is. But for me, one of the most important metric of Steem is real usage, by real people.





Data from https://www.blocktivity.info/

Capacity Utilization Index

While other blockchain are currently utilizing most of their capacity:

Steem network is currently using only 0.11% of a capacity (not 11%, but 0.11%!)

Other interesting stats

Yesterday I showed that data to my friend. He asked about 2 other things:

How big Steem blockchain is?

In terms of stored data, currently it is 52GB - this is... a lot. I mean - Steem nodes needs to store a lot of data. Is it good for Steem network? Not really. For example, integrating Steem blockchain on Exchange requires not only storage space (which is not expensive), but a lot of RAM as well (16-32GB)

How many nodes Steem blockchain has?

To be honest, I didn't found exact numbers, which I was looking for. On websites:

I have only found information about seed nodes. 2nd websites lists ip addresses of 99 seed nodes, from which 94 nodes has positive score. I think that in terms of seed nodes, that number is not bad. In terms of all nodes everything below 1000 nodes would be... not so great.

How is that? Ethereum network currently has 25102 nodes, Bitcoin network currently has 11738 nodes. In my opinion, low number of Steem nodes is a consequence of high requirements of running Steem node.

If you where number of all Steem nodes can be find, please let me know in the comments.

The future of Steem

Current usage of Steem network (0.11% of capacity) can create a misleading impression, that nothing has to be done and we should be able to scale without a problems. The truth is different.

Right now running a Steem node on home computer is very difficult or not even possible anymore. Fortunately, Steem developers are aware of challenges which are ahead of us. If you want to learn more, you should definitely watch a talk of @vandeberg from SteemFest2: