this is the million dollar question @cardboard and because the answer is so complicated I have absolute confidence 80% of SMT's will be shitcoins.

I believe im being generous with the 80% too, because in the ERC20 world the number is closer to 99%.

What needs to happen, what should happen, is that a community, or a business that launches an SMT does so with a demand proposition along with it or you are simply creating a little pump and dump shitcoin.

For example, lets say someone creates an addictive game (hopefully what steemmonsters becomes) and they sell the cards only, exclusively for their MonsterCoin-SMT then, if the game is awesome enough, this would create demand for the coin from day one.

Since steem is the portal sort of speak into buying the MonsterCoin-SMT this also creates a demand for Steem.

I imagine it would flow something like this (assuming we don't get a fiat to Steem option)

At eat stage there is speculative gains to be made, thus keeping liquidity inside the markets.

Now, I'm not saying this is what SteemMonsters is going to do, I just thought up an example of how an SMT could potentially generate its demand.