Purely a lack of marketing. The Bitshares devs are mostly technical and there is no business development, industry partnerships, PR etc. This is why Bitshares is by far the best crypto tech in the world (alongside STEEM and soon EOS) but has such a small market share. Bitshares currently does more transactions per day than Bitcoin and Ether combined. No joke. It can do over 10,000 TPS with 3 second confirmations. That is why @stan just announced a plan to fork Bitcoin over to the Bitshares chain. Seriously!
We hope to see a drastic increase in adoption over the next 12 months as the HERO contest kicks over (see @stan), the new Bitcoin on Bitshares fork kicks in and migrating to EOS when the chain goes live.
Bitshares will rise to top 5 on CMC in the next 12 months. :)
Thank you @johnsmith.
From what I have read, bitshares offers two main services:
1- a platform to create coins. and 2- a decentralized exchange.
And neither has any significant volume! The DEX is currently #368 in terms of bitcoin trading volume! That cannot be good.
It is not enough to have a good dev team and a great technology. You need adoption. The problem with exchanges is that if you don't have volume it is NOT usable. period. What is the point of having a good platform, when you can not use it?
So, adoption (and hence volume) is king in this sector, and for that, you need an equal amount of effort in business development and marketing. I have seen much smaller projects doing much better in terms of marketing their project. I think that Ignoring this side with the excuse of concentrating on technical development is a stratigical mistake.
In Steemit, the witnesses and the community are doing a great job in marketing steem. That is why it is booming. It will soon be a real competitor in the social media sector. And the fact that you would get paid in steemit is atractive by itself.
What about bitshares ?
I have checked @stan's blog. He is doing a great job, but it seemed to be an individual effort. Its effect would probably be minimal. We need much more than that. We need a marketing strategy and an experienced team applying it.
Is there such a strategy? IS there such a team?