Poloniex Will Delist STEEM + My Thoughts

Cointelegraph reported today that Poloniex will delist STEEM along with Clams, Pascal, Navcoin, Gamecredits and Ibry. Trading will be disabled on the October 28 and all withdrawals will be permanently disabled by November 15. If you have any coins on Polonies, please withdraw them as soon as possible.

It's been a brutal northwind for all small cap alts.

This is not good news. I don't think it is because of the low price of STEEM, though. I think it has to do with the very low volume of STEEM on Poloniex. According to Coinmarketcap, a whopping 96.16% of the current trading volume of STEEM is on Bithumb and in the STEEM/KRW trading pair. It seems that STEEM is overwhelmingly being traded against the South Korean Won on Bithumb and not much elsewhere. Trading on Bithumb is taking place at a considerable premium as STEEM is priced at $0.173 there, which is about 2.5 cents higher than elsewhere. The only other trading pair that has a share of over 1% of the volume is STEEM/BTC on Binance. The volume of STEEM/BTC, the only one on Poloniex, is 0.37% of the total and amounts to only about $79,000 per 24 h.

I think it should be seriously considered to enable stakeholders to power down without any delay in exchange for a portion of the liquid STEEM obtained to be burned. While having a lot of STEEM powered up and not liquid does constrict supply somewhat, it should be recognized that the lack of liquidity is the very thing that's causing some exchanges to delist STEEM. The fewer places STEEM is traded on, the less demand there will be for it once the alt coin bear market is over. One of the biggest problems of STEEM from the speculators point of view is that the official inflation is about 8.5% per annum at the moment and the actual inflation - thanks to excessive SBD printing during the last bull market - is 17%. Buying STEEM and not powering it up presents an immediate loss for a speculator while powering it up introduces a delay of 13 weeks to liquidating it. It is the very lack of speculation that makes trading volumes thin and causes exchanges to be reluctant to list it and willing to delist it at times like this. Another consequence of the lack of speculation is a lower price because the valuation of all cryptocurrencies is almost entirely speculative at the moment. Yet another one is the extreme volatility of the price of STEEM. (Yes, a high volume of trading helps keep the price more stable.)

The large volatility of the price introduces a whole another can of worms including the exclusion of the more risk averse segment of crypto investors and also the triggering of excessively high tax obligations during the price spikes under those jurisdictions where Steem income is taxable at the moment it is paid out by the blockchain.

Making powering down immediate at the cost of a percentage of the liquid STEEM obtained will alleviate all of the aforementioned concerns. I think it is something Steemit, Inc and all the witnesses should consider seriously.

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