RE: The Growing Steem Middle Class
I'm not sure that SMT's will help with the identity problem in the long term since they will ultimately make it even easier to distribute "identity" across multiple communities, some of which will not necessarily intersect. We end up with the same problem that exists now, except potentially even harder to chase down.
But in light of the identity problem, it may be difficult to actually speak reasonably about the percentage of upper echelon accounts on the blockchain. We need to know about the ratio of increase of actual tokens over that time (which is, at least, a fixed amount thankfully), compared to the distribution dynamically, with delegation taken into account.
While financial analysis isn't my field, recognizing the overall problem suggests that any analysis which tries to leverage identity is pretty much doomed to irrelevance. While we might like to take heart from the news and suggest that it means there is a rising middle class – we can't.
At least not as shown by this data.