As I was looking at Binance's hot wallet @binance-hot I began to wonder how much Steem out there remains liquid and unvested. @binance-hot has over 8 million coins alone. The more unvested Steem is out there the more our votes our worth but, at the same time, a high supply of liquid Steem means the market can crash if investors stop holding.
According to @arcange there are about 385,064 Mvests out there. 1 SP is worth about 2031 vests.
385,064,000,000 / 2031 = 189,593,304 265,057,401 - 189,593,304 = 75,464,097 75,464,097 / 265,057,401 * 100 = 28.5%
This would mean that 71.5% of all Steem coins are vested. It's surprising to consider that the remaining 28.5% can cause the value of the coin to spike up to a value of $8 and crash back down to $1.20.
I suppose this is a good reminder that a coin's market cap is a very poor approximation of a crypto's worth. A third of a billion dollars could never be extracted from this platform at this time. As soon as panic sellers flood the market and take all the liquidity away from the support line, a coins value plummets to nothing very quickly. The only thing that keeps the market cap afloat is increasing demand to buy as the value of a coin crashes. We've seen this several times now with Bitcoin hitting the $6000 mark.
The same can also be said for how much money has actually been put into Steem. If an investor pumped a few million dollars into Steem and became a whale overnight the market cap would grow much more than the few million they put in. Considering there are 265 million coins in circulation, increasing the value of Steem by $1 would obviously increase the market cap by 265 million dollars. I'm not sure how much actual money it would take to accomplish this, only that it's significantly less than 265 million.
For example, if you were to buy a million dollars worth of Ethereum right now on Coinbase that would raise the price of Ethereum by $5. There are 100 million Ethereum coins so a 1 million pump could temporarily give the perception of a +500 million market cap. Of course, Coinbase is only one exchange, so in reality this action would simply open up arbitrage opportunity for other sources of Ethereum, but you get the idea. Perhaps it really takes 10-50 million actual dollars to increase the market cap of Ethereum by 500 million.
The Steem platform has the advantage of being a coin that allows you to create inflation and tip whoever you want with it. We can support any person or project that we want to without losing any of our stake. I believe the power of this platform has hardly been realized at all. As SMTs release and the need for bandwidth grows, more and more accounts are going to be looking to vest their coins. Taking this liquidity away from the open market will spike the price and make it volatile once again. Be prepared for another roller coaster before the end of the year.
Return from Unvested Steem to edicted's Web3 Blog
