One of the limitations, people often cite about STEEM, is its higher inflation rate. Interestingly, with its hypothetical high inflation rate, creators, investors, curators are struggling to earn decent tokens. On other other hand, at low price of STEEM only $15-20M new money is required to keep STEEM price at this level. In fact, a very few percentage of newly minted STEEM are sold at the open market. Therefore this amount could be down to $3-5M which is a very little amount compared to the large cryptocurrency investor community.

It also shows that STEEM has not attracted the attention of big investors yet. STINC's silence on the Marketing is the big reason behind its pathetic position among the investors. However, STINC may get the benefit of doubt due to the focus on the developments. Perhaps, they have not enough resources to do the developments and marketing at the same time. Hopefully, after SMT and Community release, they will focus on Marketing.

![1steem_moon1.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/Qme5YE4mJbqA3aG1ova5h7fHogp6Y7xCwkRCPTBAG8TDmJ)


In the meantime, lets focus on other currencies- how much new money is required for their inflation. Moreover, these currencies have little reason to HODL other than strong speculation.

STEEM: $20M
BTC: $5.7B
ETH: $1.9B
LTC: $378M
DASH: $165M
DOGE: $32M
[Inflation Source](https://cryptovoices.com/coin-supply-and-inflation/)

Except STEEM, the insane amount of new money is required to sustain current price of these coin, still they have much higher valuation than STEEM. Even meme coin such as DOGE requires double the new money STEEM requires.

Another issue with STEEM's volume is that its volume is under-reported in CoinMarketCap. STEEM's two biggest market is @blocktrades and Steemit's internal market with SBD are not reported at any marketcap websites.

Finally, traders and investors are largely unaware about STEEM's potential and current usage (https://blocktivity.info/). Frequent outage of STEEM transfer at exchanges (@binance-hot, @hitbtc, @poloniex) is not helping either. Witnesses and STINC should work on the issue too.

The bottom line is STEEM is underrated and there are lots of FUDs about STEEM in cyberspace. It is not yet marketed well among the investors and traders. However, upcoming enthusiasm related to SMT and communities will push STEEM towards more adoption and better valuation. Finally, a well co-ordinated marketing effort from the community and STINC will bring major money to STEEM. 

[Now it is your time to predict STEEM's price at the year end in this post.](https://steemit.com/steem/@jrcornel/year-end-steem-predictions)

Cheers and keep steeming!
@riseofth
Cryptominer since 2013, occasional trader and tech blogger

**Disclaimer: This opinion is not a financial advice, it my personal perspective and opinion. Please seek professionals for financial decisions.**

![image.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmR3pfKSbtEM2Cfa7kWDh6EZjmhzcXQGWJHjZsT8MwVLp7)

Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.