Steem Vs. Dash: A Comparative Guide

Altcoin comparisons are vastly more complicated than an apples-to-apples comparison. Consider the case of Steem versus Dash. Since Dash is a currency altcoin and Steem is a utility coin, debates about the market viability of the coins are really a surrogate for whether utility coins will ever surpass currency coins' dominance of the coin market.

Tales of the Tape

	DASH (DASH)	Steem (STEEM)
Utility	Fork of Litecoin; democratically-enabled and empowered bitcoin port	Steemit network store of value, social network reward token
Number of Holders	~591,250	557,136
Community	Large	Small (less than 1,000,000)
Daily Trading Volume (2017 high)	$641,698,000	$443,263,000
One-Year Performance (2017)	9,079.62% (14,262.89 % from 12-month low to 12-month high)	1,706.25% (2,779.41% from 12-month low to 12-month high)
Public Awareness	Low	Low

Apples and Oranges

Looking just at the comparison chart above, many may be scratching their heads, asking what there is to compare between the two coins. DASH is the eleventh highest valuated coin (Steem is 28^th), with a 2017 valuation more than six times that of Steem. 

This, however, ignores the fact that since the beginning of 2018, DASH has been in a bear market, while Steem has doubled its position and has had a three-month high in excess of $8.50 per coin.

To understand why this is significant, you must look critically at both coins. With over 267 million STEEM coins in the STEEM ecosystem, STEEM has more volatility and liquidity than DASH at 18,900,000 coins. Liquidity has played an important part of Steem's valuation; Steem's 2016 decision to rollback the launch of new coins from doubling the supply each year to limiting growth to 9.5 percent per year - decreasing by 0.5 percent each year - created a delayed response from which the coin is only starting to recover.

Steem, however, is an "appcoin." What this means is, unlike DASH, which can be evaluated on its own weight, Steem will always be dependent on the popularity of Steemit. "Whether Steem succeeds as a digital currency will be more a reflection of Steemit's success as a platform as opposed to the economics of the coin itself," Joe Lee, co-founder and CIO of Magnr, told CoinDesk. "This is a good example of a digital currency whose value will be closely affiliated to its utilitarian value as a social networking and sharing platform."

Steemit is a social networking platform that rewards users and creators for content and forum curating.While the idea of rewarding creators and readers directly for social networking is novel and a fair way of democratizing the profit model of social media, Steemit's small community base and the potential to spam the network with low-quality content to fuel views and participation in the reward system keeps the idea suspect in some people's minds.

The question of whether a proper "dollar peg" can be pulled off or if the Steemit economy is viable has led some to be critical of Steem. DASH, on the other hand, has been around for nearly four years and has features - such as its "super-nodes"network, which enable faster transaction processing than its bitcoin-clone sibling - that makes it at least a contender for the role of bitcoin successor should the market move past bitcoin.

Despite this, the current interest in Steem makes it, at least temporarily, worth considering as an attractive investment possibility.

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