Steem Dollar SBD pumps 40% in one hour today – any ideas why?

Did you see the SBD Steem dollar pump today? I missed it as it occurred while I slept but it looked epic on the chart in hindsight. What was the cause and why such a brief pump and retrace?

At 3.33am GMT this morning the price of one Steem dollar SBD was around a dollar- $0.985 to be exact. Totally normal and expected for the stable coin pegged to the US dollar. But then a sudden massive spike in the price pushed it all the way up to the moon.

At 4.20am GMT (give or take 4 mins) the SBD peaked at $1.41. Now that is what I would call a total anomaly. Volume in US dollars went from $646 464 before the pump to $2 283 039 at the time of the peak. Trading volume actually maintained this high performance, eventually peaking at $3 471 882 at around 1.44pm GMT and has since been diminishing, albeit very slightly. Presumably much of the volume at that time of day is coming from Asia, who have already woken to the new day while the rest in the west still sleep in the shadow or dark side of the planet.

Volume in trading of US dollars is still around $3 million and price of SBD has retraced to $1.06 at the time of writing this – 4.20pm GMT. So for the past 12 hours trading volume in US dollars has been 5x or 500% above average. What is going on? Any ideas from the Steem community? I managed to notice the price pump and sell some SBD around $1.12 on the internal exchange for Steem, which itself has been on quite a run lately. On 6 February Steem was a humble $0.26 but has since been on an epic bull run, peaking at $0.55 just three days ago on 10 March. This is a promising sign to be sure. Alt season appears to be upon us and Steem is diving into the action.

For a cryptocurrency that has one of the most active communities on the blockchain and a massive valuable use case on the Steemit social media platform, I foresee Steem making way bigger upward moves in the coming days and weeks. Sentiment is hugely positive and the fundamentals are powerful. Who has as many Dapps built on their blockchain compared to Steem lately. Perhaps Ethereum can have a small stake to the claim but neither Tron nor Eos are looking nearly as favorable to me personally at the moment.

Still holding around $0.50, Steem has definitely surpassed bitcoin in the current bull run or what looks like the start of Spring after the long crypto winter of 2018. It has been 15 months of bear market and the crypto world is looking eastward, eagerly anticipating the return of the sun to thaw us out and help the frozen prices to grow once more. In time they will rise like tall trees, their branches reaching up to the moon, it’s just a matter of time.

In my mind it is happening, only time is separating us. It is written in the previous bitcoin price cycle, particularly the bear market of 2014/5 where price saw a new ATH only to retrace around 85% or thereabouts and then climb once more when Spring came, blossoming into a huge flowering of price in the mid summer days of December 2017 (literally it was mid-summer for me in the southern hemisphere).

Such fond memories of the ATH of late 2017 still play in my mind. And they encourage me to stay optimistic that they will return once more, like summer does every year, after the long bearish winter of our discontent, as Shakespeare called it in his play Richard III:

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

Shakespeare aside though, if you have any ideas or analysis as to what caused the SBD Steem stable dollar to react so destabilized to the upside, then please leave a comment below and shed some light on the mystery for us.