Steem has a design flaw/feature that it gains momentum fast in either direction.
Once it starts going up , SBD prints and less steem on market , more people powering up since rev by curation can be quite nice , new content creators coming in.
Once it starts going down , STINC needs to sell even more to fund the operations , people don't earn anything from posts so they up and leave...
quite interesting
Steemit Inc. has done a lot to reduce costs and managed to survive so far with some cool new features coming soon (SMT's and communities). The haze of infinite money is gone and economically it feels a lot more realistic under the new leadership.
When markets pickup I'm sure they will build a buffer and also this time around they also have an extra revenue stream in place (ads). When traffic picks up this should generate some extra nice funds for them.