New Business Models

For STEEM price to grow, businesses from the Steem ecosystem need to shift more decisively from the reward pool to other business models.

Otherwise Steemit, dapps and witnesses will keep powering down and sell their liquidities to cover expenses.

Steemit made some good steps during its survival mode, to reduce costs both for itself as a company but also for witnesses plus anyone else intending to run full nodes - like some dapps.

On the other hand, they introduced advertising on steemit.com, providing more funds to even the balance, that don't come from selling STEEM, but from incoming fiat (or possibly other crypto) from advertisers. That seems like a good solution.

The only other projects I know on Steem that have advertising in their business model are Partiko (with the video ads), Steem Monsters (with banner ads and tournament sponsorships) and dClick.io, but the latter could use an upgrade to support fiat and other cryptocurrencies, as well as possibly make it embeddable in other (d)apps. There might be more, but these are the ones I know. If you know others, please do let us know in the comments below.

Apart from exchanges, for which this is the main business model, I don't know any other business on Steem except Steem Monsters which can attract fiat money and / or funds from other cryptocurrencies into the ecosystem. Why is that?

Quite a few dapps made steps to create and maintain their own tokens, as a first step before SMTs will be released. They are in various stages of making those tokens really usable.

Probably the farthest is SteemHunt, which will have their token HUNT listed on Daybit exchange by May. In the process, they also had some successful IEOs, so they secured some funds, and gave their token a possible reference value, and also got STEEM (and SBD, I believe) listed on Daybit.

Having community-driven or project-driven tokens is the way to go to make sure the reward pool isn't drained continuously, and to make each community/project managers act more responsibly, since their actions will reflect directly into the price of the token, instead of being under the bigger umbrella of STEEM.