I thin we are in for better times for steem. One of the reasons and the main reason at that is the listing of steem and SBd on that korean exchange, "Upbit". You will notice SBD started receiving a pump around 6th Dec which is not far from when Those two tokens were listed on that exchange. What it cause was an increase in the market cap of the tokens and of cause the volume and then the price. Check out the screen shot below...

Imagine Upbit not in the exchange biz of sbd, then we might not be seeing this... Imagine bittrex with the volume it has there used to have the highest volume of SBD trading before now, then we would have still maintained our SBD at 1$ haha...

Check out this price history below....

You can see the point at which the market cap increased was thesame point price responded and changed....

Okay, we had this quick for SBD because of it's lower supply when compared to steem. Steem had to do some "strugling" before it responded.

Now on steem,

There has been a big spike in amount of new registrations recently. If you notice too; that's more adoption of steem.. Now, the reward system is structured in such a way that less steem is paid out now... This would help control the liquidity of steem and help it "respond faster to stimulus".