There is a lot of speculation about the price of Steem and I've seen predictions as high as $10 by the end of the year. While I do think Steem price will increase in the near future, I don't see it that high.What follows is a list of reasons for the Steem price evolution medium term. 

1 Scalability issues tracked

The number one issue for Steemit these months was scalability - or how it handled an increased number of users. There are at least two levels: content and technical.By content I understand the degradation of the posts and comments, with a wave of low quality, borderline spam activity, as a result of Steemit being perceived as "blog whatever the shit you want and make a quick buck out of think air".In my humble opinion we may see the growth issues handled in a consistent way in about 3 to 6 months. That will certainly help with the Steem adoption as more and more users will start consuming the platform in better conditions.

2 Arbitrary split of rewards

I've been talking about this for a while and I still think this is probably the bigger growth factor for the Steem technology. It is already used in apps like busy.org, chainbb.com and the mobile app eSteem.This feature allows anybody to create their own content ecosystem on top of the Steemit blockchain and get paid automatically by retaining a percentage of everything that's generated in that ecosystem..This attitude will slowly dissolve during the next months as competition will increase in this sector and as the percentages will become more palatable for the end user.

3 User Issued Assets (UIA) on the Steem blockchain

This was announced a few months ago by @ned and I think it will be a game changer, if we can see it implemented by the end of the year.What that means, in layman terms, is that anybody could build their own token on top of the Steemit platform, just like you can do it now on the Bitshares blockchain.