The value of every cryptocurrency is nearly completely speculative at the moment. The valuations depend very heavily on speculative traders. Buy volume and sell volume are of vital importance.

I did back of the envelope calculations on the potential organic (non-speculative) value of Steem a few months ago based on the number of monthly active users (MAU) and revenue generated by social media platforms per MAU. The result was that if Steem were as good as the best of them, Twitter, which was capable of generating about $9 of revenue per year per MAU, then the price of STEEM that could support would be about $0.01. The regrettable fact is that speculation on a dozen or so centralized exchanges are where the money comes from into the entire space. It won't change any time soon but perhaps in the long term decentralized solutions like cross-chain swaps can replace centralized exchanges.