Actual liquid supply as of today is around 1.2 million Steem, with around 50% held by Steemit and another ~25% held by Bittrex and Blocktrades combined. The rest is held in Steem Power.
The low volume is partly due, in my opinion, to the unclear value proposition, convoluted distribution (vesting vs liquid) and unproven nature of the system. It will be interesting to see what happens following the first big payout on the 4th of July, at which point the internal market will come to life and more Steem will enter circulation from people powering down their Steem Power rewards. We live in interesting times :)
Thanks for the clarity! But still! Even uncertainty breeds a kind of volume.
Certainly looking forward to July 4.
Ummm can steem dollars trade natively on the bitshares exchange? I guess not since they are not a bitshares asset. I'd love to see more volume on the bitUSD/Steem pair as well as some party that will happily exchange any number of Steem Dollars for bitUSD.
Interesting times indeed!
No, but Steem includes the same kind of exchange functionality that Bitshares has, only limited to the STEEM:STEEM DOLLARS pair. Hopefully steemit.com will offer trading in this pair come July 4th, but if it doesn't I'm sure it won't take long for it to appear.
Regarding OPEN.STEEM:USD on the Bitshares network, I noticed Xeldal's bot enki has started trading in several OPEN.STEEM pairs which should help liquidity there.