Between November 20 and December 8, 2017, the price of Steem Dollars (SBD) rose from around $0.96 a piece to $7.36. That’s a close to 670% increase in what essentially amounts to a couple of weeks.
This time around, however, things are a little bit different.
Before i explain why it’s worth noting exactly what SBD is and how it relates to the platform Steemit and the cryptocurrency Steem (STEEM).
As many reading will likely already be aware, Steemit is a sort of social media, content curation type platform over which content creators get paid for the content they create. This payment is made in STEEM and SBD is a sort of sister currency to STEEM that’s designed to track the US dollar and offer a quick and easy way of figuring out exactly how much each Steemit user is getting paid for the content they create.
As such, inherently, SBD should always trade in and around the one-dollar mark. Take a look at action over the last three months, as illustrated on the chart below, and this becomes apparent.
SBD ChartSBD Chart
Of course, pegging something like this to the US dollar is going to have its inefficiencies and the latest run is one such example of this potential for inefficiency. The thing to realize, however, is that this isn’t like a normal cryptocurrency – it’s not running to the moon. It will return to one dollar as the blockchain mechanisms on which Steemit rests adapt to the increased price and, in turn, push it back down.
So that all seems pretty boring – we can’t really short sell SBD so that means that there’s no real opportunity to take a profit from the market on this action – right?
Well, not necessarily.
The link between STEEM and SBD is a liquid one in the sense that when the price of SBD goes up, the dollar or bitcoin exchange rate is favorable which, in turn, means that if you cash out your SBD for BTC now and then use that BTC to buy STEEM, you’re going to get much more STEEM for your SBD than you would’ve done just a couple of weeks ago.
You can then hold that STEEM and convert it back into SBD once things settle down again and the profit you’ve made is the difference between the value of the STEEM you pick up now against the SBD you sell to acquire it and the number of SBD you get for your STEEM once you convert it back into BTC to buy SBD when SBD falls back down to its inherent value of one US dollar.
Of course, there is a certain degree of risk rooted in the exchange rates for the US dollar and bitcoin as compares to STEEM across the period of time it takes between now and SBD to return back down to one dollar a coin but, the higher SBD rises, the lower this risk becomes based on the fact that you got more leeway on the arbitrage trade.
As ever, keep in mind that this is a very volatile market and even these sorts of positions can never be guaranteed. With that said, however, as far as quick and easy opportunities go in the market and, especially, in this market, this is one that doesn’t come around too often.
-(Globalcoin)
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