As of Nov 2017, there are more than 430,000 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.

The exchange rate of STEEM compared to Bitcoin rose continuously during July 2016, peaking at a price of over 4 US dollars. 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. As of May 25th, 2016, its market cap is 258 million US dollars.

Steemit was described as a novel and "disruptive blockchain-based media community" by Adam Hayes (Investopedia) in July 2016. It got media coverage in cryptocurrency- and business-related media. 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.

Criticism:
Some industry experts question the need for a unique token specific to steem when bitcoin or ether could be used. Others point out that steem might be a Ponzi scheme, predicting that the digital currency "will grow and grow until there are no fresh users to suck in and then quickly collapse".

Monetary system:
The Steem blockchain has two tokens: STEEM and Steem Dollars. There is also a vested or stored interest known as Steem Power. Steem Power is strictly for internal use in the Steem community, while the tokens are used for stored value and trading.

Steem began with a highly inflationary supply model, doubling roughly every year. However due to community demand, on December 6th, 2016 the inflation rate of Steem was changed to 9.5% per year, reducing by 0.5% per year.