I will provide a little bit of different perspective here. Price drives most of the activity in Steem blockchain. Steemit hit the highest Alexa ranking (below 1000) during last all time high price.
It was mostly pumped during the bull market by Korean whales at Upbit exchange. Other exchanges just followed upbit. That means speculators (mostly Korean traders) drived the price during December and January.
Now, the speculators left in droves for other hyped coins in pursuit of profit.
If you look into DOGE or Bitcoin Diamond, which offer nothing but some PnD opportunity to speculators, have relatively higher marketcap. Holding higher marketcap does not suggest technical superiority or innovation at all. What innovation BCH, BSV, BTG provides, nothing but little tweaks in mining algos, but they are always in the news which attract speculators or investors. Even when Justin Son founder of TRON with 650K twitter followers ask ETH and EOS developers switch to TRON or troll Vitalik, TRON gets publicity. By the way, @ned has less than 10K twitter followers. Outside of Steemit very few people know about Steem, most crypto enthusiasts have negative or misinformation about Steem such as 100% inflation or, whales controlling rewards, 70% firing etc.
Steem is lacking speculators big time. Moreover, pessimism from the community and mis-steps from STINC drove away a large number of speculators and investors.
Another issue is the supply side of Steem as you mentioned that 20M Steem were produced in last 6 months. It put lots of stress on the Market. Steem has relatively high inflation (9% a year) vs those ICOs which has 0% inflation. ICO holders (e.g. EOS) will not sell heavily during bear market since they have bought them at first hand. On the other hand, 9% newly minted Steem can always be dumped in open market without losing the initial holding.
My proposal is to further decrease Steem inflation to 2-3%. For example, 1% for the witnesses, 1% for PoS, 1% for upvoting. Or, Upvoting can be totally replaced by a new SMT. Say, Steemit SMT for Steemit. It will drastically reduce Steem supply and when Steem will be traded against SMTs, Steem is destined to rise.
It is similar to ETH. ERC20 ICOs raised the demand for ETH.
Another way to think if Steem had 0% inflation, it may not have lost its market position from 25 to 54 too. There are lots of literally worthless ICO's holding their position due to 0% new supply, for example, nano or IOTA.
Finally, aggressive marketing. Steem already has superior technology to be in top ten. It lacks branding. If an ICO without a viable product can easily rank above in CMC, then it is all about marketing. Marketing is also essential when a product has limited exposure such most crypto-enthusiast misunderstand Steemit for Steem, Steem has 100% inflation etc. Another big issue is that nobody is pushing Steem to BitFinex or OKex. It could be due to expensive node issue, however, ICO owners aggressively push their coins to exchanges, sometimes offer renomuration.
Even if you set the inflation at 1%, you still have
The Steemit Inc selling is like having an additional +10%+ baked in inflation.
Also with an inflation at 1%, it's going to incentivize the content creators and witnesses to do even less things, since their paychecks will be almost 90% lower than at an inflation of 9%.
Idea was to keep witness's inflation to same level as of now. And moving reward pool to multiple SMTs. The advantage of SMT will be that it can be experimented with different reward distribution algorithms.
Unless SBD falls below $1, having large amount of liquid SBD is not an issue. However, currently SBD is a mess and trading 60 cents and ratio of SBD/STEEM is not incentivized to convert SBD to Steem.
Steemit INC can Sell an ICO for for Steemit SMT to fund Steemit condenser. Or, they can look for different funding sources. Selling insta-mining Steem in bear market is not helping Steem cause. I had another idea whose time has passed but may be a thought for future:
No disrespect bud, but if you think the inflation in Steem needs to go away, you just don't understand the concept of Steem. Its whole value is wrapped around its inflation. On Steem, the concept of what makes this blockchain valuable is its variety of methods one profits on Steem, and this depends upon the inflation-based incentive model.
It is steadily reducing the inflation rate yearly by 0.5%, which is a satisfactory number. This gradual deflation rate allows for a sense of scarcity over time which benefits early adopters while allowing newcomers to enter without an immediate sense of unfairness. What was unfair is when the inflation rate suddenly went from 100% to 9.5%. This is why there is such a wealth disparity and why the meritocracy of the most promising opportunity for a meritocracy economy went to crap. Dropping from 8.5% to 3% would only be a repeat of this tragedy.
All the coins are technically inflationary, unless they are just automatically not mine-able coins.