Yields, Risks, Liquidity. These are the three most important factors investors are weighting if they want to invest. Yield is mostly incalculable, unpredictable in the case of cryptocurrencies. (Between –100% and +one million percent, perhaps?) Risks are very high, that indicates also the famously high volatility (the range of variation, the oscillation of the prices).

Can you cash out without losses?

But today let’s speak about the third factor, liquidity. That means, if and how you can make your investment liquid. With other words, sell it for cash, or “cash it out”. Questions emerge as if that causes you losses in the price you achieve or losses by fees. If there are buyers at all if selling is a matter of time or can be made instantly.

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This is different in every market. Some assets can have high fees (like investment funds and trusts), some, high margins between the bid and ask offers (selling and buying prices). Some “illiquid” assets have a scarcity of buyers and that causes long waiting times or price falls if you want to sell considerable volumes of your investment.

Why is volume important?

The market volume is a very important measuring indicator watched closely by millions of investors worldwide. For example, if the price of an asset is jumping without significant volume, the “breakout” can be fake. The price can be only a coincidence. (Maybe nobody wanted to sell and only one person was willing to buy so high.)

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The volume can indicate if selling or buying pressure is real or false. The direction of the market can be predicted sometimes knowing prices and volumes. If a trend comes with a high volume that means mostly a more serious movement.

21 thousand dollars, on average

So, the volume is important. Let’s see the volume of our new, internal “crypto exchange”, the Steem-Engine market. Here you can find the trading volume of the different tokens in the last 24 hours. That is good news. The bad news, there are no aggregates nor historical data, statistics.

In my spreadsheet, I’m collecting now this data and making queries to know how prices and volumes are evolving. By my estimates, and if the posted data on Steem-Engine.com is adequate, this market had an average daily volume of approximately 21 thousand USD (19 thousand EUR).

We aren’t millionaires, not in USD

In the first chart, you can see the daily volume data I collected and calculated. The numbers vary between 10 and 51 thousand, approximately. The aggregated volume means, volume total of 24 trading days was 534 thousand – more than half a million USA dollars.

In the second chart, you see the daily trading of Steem itself, by data on Coinmarketcap.com, mostly by the information of crypto-exchanges. Of course, it is much more: The volume often reaches one million, the average was 1.15 million in the analyzed 26 days. Approximately 55-fold more than Steem-Engine market volume.

Is SCTM the king?

Finally, let’s see which tokens are most traded, in terms of trading value. In the mentioned time frame, SCTM (SCT miner) was by far the most traded token, with almost 200,000 USD. That is 37 percent of all volume. I don’t know why, but I see there is no special day, or better, there are many. Ultimately, on various days, the volume of SCTM reached 10-20 thousand USD.

Other popular tokens are SCT itself (“steemcoinpan token”), then Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) and Steem Engine Token (ENG). See the table for further data. The table contains all tokens with an aggregated trading value over 10 USD.

Series Steem-Engine tokens reports

1. Do You Still Believe In Your Tokens?
2. Which Token Fell 80 Percent In A Single Day?

Answer my poll please: Which Tribe Has More Future?

About the data:

I’m collecting all token prices from July the 7th on, once a day, approximately at 4-5 p. m. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). I’m not a robot or developer and I’m not always online, so some delays can happen. The data is so more estimation than an exact recording. Data on July 9 and 15 are completely missing. If somebody knows how to regain this information more precisely from the blockchain please message me.)