If you have been looking at price charts today you might wonder how Steem has been able to grow it's market cap so much with so low volume.
Explanation is simple: There are not that much liquid steems.
You can check the current percentage of liquid steems easily.
- Go to steemd.com
- Look values for current_supply, total_reward_fund_steem and total_vesting_fund_steem
- Calculate amount: current_supply - total_reward_fund_steem - total_vesting_fund_steem = liquid steems
- Calculate percentage: liquid steems / current_supply * 100 = liquid steems %
Right now, as I'm writing this, there are 468,534 liquid steems which is 0.84 % of all steems.
So you can probably understand now why it's easy for price to go high if there is even a little bit more demand. Steems are really scarce resource because most of them are locked in reward fund and in vesting fund (aka Steem Power).
Bittrex orderbook has currently less than 14,000 steems in asks.
What if a whale comes and wants to get a big stake in Steem? Well, that's not possible without the price skyrocketing. Even if the whale could buy all liquid steems with current market price that wouldn't be a big sum – only about 770 bitcoins as I'm writing this.