The July spike brought in a lot of influential people that would have never come without high payouts. And these people brought many of their followers with them. Hype is very important for these small projects to get off the ground. If you take monero for example, do you really think the only fact that one darknet market implemented monero is the only reason the price went from a dollar to 12 dollar? It's all the hype that was created around it, and now monero has a lot more credibility and visibility in the crypto space. The same hype brought ethereum in the spotlight. Another thing is that on steem the user base can't grow without the price increasing as rewards would keep going down for everyone until nobody want to use the site anymore.
What do you think is the main driver for growth?