Roughly how much Steem investors have bought? A very lucrative opportunity is waiting for future investors in Steem.

Steemit Inc. roughly has 73M Steem in @steemit, @steem, @misterdelegation in these three accounts.

There are large number of early founders, devs and investors who hold 20-30M Steem together. The founding investors are those who provided the seed money for initial developments for the Steem blockchain, most probably @freedom is one of them.

If we assume that the following accounts that were created between March and April, 2016 are the early stakeholders, then they still hold the largest amount of SP rather than the new stakeholders or investors. Together they have 30M Steem. An interesting fact is that exchanges only have 50M Steem that can be purchased.

@freedom (9M), @mottler(2.3M), @databass(1.75M), @jamesc (1.6M), @michael-b (1.54M SP), @val-b(1.7M SP), @xeldal(1.12M SP), @proskynneo(1.05M SP), @roadscape(975K SP), @riverhead(893K SP), @tombstone(866K SP), @arhag(800K SP), @adm(770K SP), @batel(650K SP), @wackou(560K SP), @steemed(533K SP), @bob(533K SP), @jaewoocho(497K SP), @recursive(460K SP), @val-a(453K SP), bitcube(426K SP).

Therefore, we can assume at least 100M Steem were not purchased that were instamined before the launch of Steemit website. On the other hand, there are 325M total supply of Steem including SBD. You can find this total supply in steemd.com current supply section.

It is really hard to guess how much mined (or, created as inflation) Steem or SBD were never sold or bought. However, we can safely discard 100M Steem/SP from the early stakeholders. If we take a wild guess that out of the remaining 225M SP/Steem/SBD, 150M of them were mined or earned from the inflation, then 75M Steem/SBD were bought by the investors.

It also means that 250M or, 76% of Steem has never been sold or purchased.

There are also 50M Steem in the exchanges, out of them there could be large number of Steem that are waiting for to be sold which means never sold.

If we take another wild guess about the average sell price of those 75M Steem/SBD at 80 cents, then roughly $60M new money is used to purchase Steem or entered Steem blockchain.

Considering Steem's marketcap was once $2B at peak (@$8.5), these amount of money is just peanuts. Also, @exyle's latest post mentioned that roughly $22M is required for all the leftover liquid STEEM. This also put us in a perspective that one third of the money from the sold Steem ($60M) can be used to buy up all the liquid Steem, right now.

It is also shame that Steem have not attracted large investors. Only known large investors (guessed from their activity) are @ranchorelaxo/@haejin(1.5M SP), @hendrikdegrote(1.15M SP), @thejohalfiles(1.02M SP), @minority-report(1M SP),
@fyrstikken/@booster(1M SP), @adsactly(700K SP), @sigizzang(635K), @created(620K SP), @glitterfart(545K SP), @byubat(522K SP), @ngc/@berniesanders (1M SP), in total 11-13 whales. It means out of 36 whales only 12 are investors who bought 10M Steem from the open market. If they have earned 40% from the inflation, then it is roughly only 6M Steem, at current price mere $1.56M.

The overall analysis shows that a single or a group of investors can buy out large portion of liquid Steem and can have a great influence in the long run in Steem's development. If he or they work strategically they can make large profits too.

Steem is dying for Winklevoss Brother type investors. In fact, one with one-tenth wealth of them (considering their initial wealth from FB lawsuit is in 100s of Millions), can take big stakes in Steem. In fact, Steem is a revolutionary considering it is a decent competitor all the centralized social media Apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Quora, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr etc. Steemit.com once ranked below 1000 in Alexa rating.

It could also mean that the world of investors do not know about Steem's potential. Also, there are lots of misinformation about Steem in the crypto-sphere. A single BTC/ETH/XRP whale can take control of Steem or make big effect on how it works.

From my personal perspective, when I thirst thought about buying BTC it was $32 a piece in February, 2013. In last 5 years. I have invested $40K in cryptocurrency.

If miraculously I would have bought BTC with $40K on that time, then I could have 1250 BTC at my hand. With 1250 BTC, I could have buy 18M Steem or one third of the liquid Steem at current price of 26 cents.

It shows how an early BTC/ETH/XRP whale or multi-millionaire investor can change the direction of Steem and make himself/themselves very influential and filthy rich in the upcoming DApp revolution leading by Steem.

Disclaimer: This opinion is not a financial advice, it my personal perspective and opinion. Please seek professionals for financial decisions.

Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.

Thanks for reading.
@riseofth
Cryptominer since 2013, occasional trader and tech blogger