It's not a new situation - It's a second month like that. I'm not surprised that you didn't notice that before though - my list is not upvoted by the whales for those two months, so visibility is smaller than when I was publishing the report with all communities growing.

In my opinion, there are some major reasons why we are (and will be for the next 2-3 months) in crisis.

• the exodus of those who did not adapt to the new club5050 requirements
• 10 times higher power-downs than usual in the last month, mostly caused by one whale with over a million SP who is leaving the platform. Nobody who we can know, the bid bot user, I think Korean or Chinese, but I'm too lazy to check it now ;)
• BTC is quite low, and our crypto is doing well only when BTC value is high
• recent upgrades on the Hive platform and lack of any major upgrades here in the last few months.

I'm not a specialist, but I believe the next few months can be difficult, and then, maybe from March, maybe April, we will start growing again. It's a good time to accumulate some extra SP - maybe buy some on the market, maybe just increase the activity and get more boomings & SC upvotes to power everything (or nearly everything) up.

I may not be a very long time on the platform, but I remember times when for a while STEEM was worth 0,25 USD so it's not that bad yet. Then also many users stopped writing but as soon as STEEM went up, everything came back to normal.