Its been a rough couple weeks for Steemians as most have seen their portfolio "halved" in value and the resultant Hive fork continued to gain ground on Steem, the project that brought social media to cryptocurrency in a big way. I must admit I was really surprise by the performance of Hive, I did not calculate it would have out perform Steem like it did and continues to trade at twice the Steem value, even enjoying better trading volume than Steem. The hardfork was a good display whether you like the outcome or not, it brought a lot of attention to both platform and much more people are aware that there is an alternative to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. This was the overall positive I gather from the whole situation, nonetheless, my portfolio suffered, neither Steem or SBD performed the way I thought they would and I eventually got dump on. The situation wasn't stellar for me across exchanges, the liquidity on HitBTC got worse and I thrown in the towel on their team fixing the wallet. It seem like they running a fractional reserve orderbook where they selling tokens on both Steem and SBD that they do not have in reserve. The volume on Bittrex has been great and their wallet support and team has been very responsive, they had minimal downtime.
Overall, I thought Steem would shine and outperform Hive given the fact that its backed by Justin Sun and Tron. Justin Sun and Tron brings a lot of energy and marketing to the cryptocurrency space. I see them as the "Apple" of the cryptocurrency space and Steem as a great platform for them to onboard the masses. Steem already has a user base, and has brought a lot of people to the cryptocurrency space, in fact, its often the gateway drug for most people. One of the challenges of Steem and Steemit, has been the poor performance of the token and numerous miss milestones. Steemit was the biggest bear of its own token as they dump to pay bills. I saw the Justin Sun backing as a way out of that dilemma and eventual energy boost to platform and ultimately to the token. The team would now have a financial muscle and attention would be focus on delivering goals. Some saw it differently and went their separate ways and while the outcome has been harsh on Steem token holders, I did not calculate it would have been so bad.
With the Bitcoin halving upon us and the market looking for direction, I feel the next couple days to weeks would be very important as to who eventually win market-share for the most dominant social media cryptocurrency base project. It would be interesting to see how Justin and the Steem team craft their way forward and how much of the community they can win and the energy and excitement they can get behind the project again. As with most things cryptocurrency, I guess we have to look at token price and volume as metrics going forward. Lets see what's in store