About Steem Usage and media coverage

As of May 2017, there are more than 170,000 Steem accounts. After an initial public beta for which no payments were made, the hard fork on July 4th, 2016 saw $1,300,000 of STEEM and Steem Dollars paid out to Steemit users.[8]

The exchange rate of STEEM compared to Bitcoin rose continuously during July 2016, peaking at a price of over 4 US dollars.[4] In most of July 2016, Steem had the third largest market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies monitored by the website Coinmarketcap.com, reaching a first notable peak at July 20th, with about 405 million US dollars.[9] As of May 25th, 2016 its market cap is 258 million United States dollars.

Steemit has been described as a novel and "disruptive blockchain-based media community" by Adam Hayes (Investopedia) in July 2016.[4] It got media coverage in cryptocurrency- and business-related media.[10][11] Author Neil Strauss, a Steemit member, wrote an article for Rolling Stone calling its reward distribution "particularly clever" and echoing the sentiment of its disruptive potential.[12]