It is funny how the price of Steem is increasing, when the number of active users and the real human interaction on the Steem blockchain in general are decreasing. According to today's statistics (and the statistics of the previous three years), the value of Steem should go down, as more and more people are losing interest in it.
Yes that is a correct assessment. It is now a trading vehicle
Actually, Steem could be very valuable digital real estate if all the photographers and lifestyle bloggers get shaken out. Right now, Twitter and Medium are still better locations for discussing cryptocurrencies, partly because the Steem community is rather anti-Ethereum and other blockchains they consider to be competition to the STEEM token.
However, if Steem became much more friendly to all the crypto projects out there and burning STEEM became the way to promote your crypto project to a large community of crypto investors, Steem could become the crypto hub for investors. It is not that currently, but it has that potential.
The Tron Foundation bought Steemit Inc. and Binance bought Coinmarketcap.com because they realize how difficult it is to drive traffic to crypto projects. I would not be surprised if the Minds.com company receives an acquisition proposal from somebody soon.
Unless their accounts got frozen ;)