1. How much money is going in and out of Steemit?

2. And how much money is being transferred between users?

Before I begin the analysis, I have to give endless credit to @arcange, the creator of the http://steemsql.com/ database. Without making this amazing project free, I could not have done this analysis. All the data used here is extracted from the SteemSQL database by Tableau. Please go and support him if you can, even in the smallest way, so that people can continue to produce transparent and interesting analyses about the world of Steem.

Method:

• Look at the table TxTransfers, that gives you all the transfers made by users to eachother and in and out of Steemit.
• Set groups to define exchanges (blocktrades, bittrex, etc.)
• I've had to filter out some special users, that have caused huge outliers in the transfer data: @abit, @adm, @alpha, @ned, @steemit, @steemit2, and bunch all the other users together to get a nice comparison.

Summing up "TO" (top bars) and "FROM" (bottom bars) transfers (Y-Axis: amount of STEEM)

I honestly don't know what's going on in these 3 mega outliers caused by the super-whales, perhaps someone who knows the history of Steemit a bit better can enlighten me in the comments :). If we take these super-whale outliers out, we can get a better comparison between how much has been transferred to and from exchanges compared to between users.

We can see that the number of transfers people are making isn't really growing much compared to how much the user base is growing at the moment. Particularly, last week has shown perhaps the beginning of a slowing down in activity, reflecting a general drop in hype in the cryptocurrency world.

We should also look at the net difference between transfers with exchanges, namely to find out how much money is going actually in and out of the Steemit user base.

*negative values indicate a sending of STEEM onto an exchange

Wow, that's a LOT of STEEM being sold into the wider market. Kind of to be expected since that's one of the core ideas of the platform. I just wasn't sure how much people are putting in it as well.

And finally, I'm curious whether the NET INFLOW-OUTFLOW ratio (black bars) has any correlation to the price of STEEM on the open market:

Well, we clearly see that the crypto-hype in December caused a surge of outflows to exchanges over new years, as people were using the favourable price situation. However, if you consider that there are around 350k active users, that would mean that on average, each Steem user withdrew about 8 STEEM from their account during this surge. Of course it's probably silly to take an average here because the wealth distribution is very unequal. But in any case, the amount is not that dramatic after all...

This was the second instalment of me trying to answer questions by data. Check out the first one here, trying to answer "Which category is the most social on Steemit".

Thanks for reading! Happy steeming :)
@remuslord