2800% difference in price of SteemDollar!! Is arbitrage possible?!?!

UNBELIEVABLE DIVERGENCE 

Hello everyone, this was supposed to be my introductory post, but as I was familiarizing myself with Steemit and wrapping around terms such as Steem, Steemdollars, Steem power etc, I came across this presumably rare situation which surprised me and seized all my attention subsequently!     

HOW CAN ANYONE BE UNFAZED AFTER SEEING THIS ON YOUR PC SCREEN!!  

Steem Dollars was trading for $44.15 on HitBTC while it is trading for $1.56 on Upbit and $1.53 on Bittrex! That's approximately a whopping 2800%/28x difference on the 10th of June 2018!!    

Here is some context on price discrepancy of tokens before we delve further into what happened: 

KIMCHI PREMIUM AND GENERAL ARBITRAGE TRADING 

It is quite common in crypto sphere to notice price discrepancy of tokens across various exchanges.  Last year, prior to the collapse of the bull run in late January 2018, a widespread phenomenon known as the "kimchi premium" allowed common traders to capitalize on arbitrage trades by buying low on US/overseas exchanges and selling them at higher prices on Korean exchanges almost simultaneously without the use of high speed frequency strategies and tools. 

Token price on Korean exchanges can be selling for up to 40% premiums and more!!  While it still happens occasionally, the difference of token prices across exchanges now are mostly not significant enough for common traders to profit, only high speed bots trading (in bulk) are able to make meaningful arbitrage trades.  

You can read up more on this via this link: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kimchi-premium.asp

In fact, arbitrage opportunities were present even without using the "kimchi premium" strategy.. 

This was in early December 2017 and my friend and I were able to make a quick 10% by simply trading across exchanges. 

WILL THE ARBITRAGE BE POSSIBLE THIS TIME TOO? 

Without further hesitation, I plunge right into the account sign up page of hitbtc.com, registered a fresh account and quickly verified the price on the platform.    

When I saw the screens above, I beamed widely as the chart and order book checks out. I started thinking to myself, it must be my luckiest day! 28 fold awaits in an instant!!  While it is important to note that this should not be blown out of proportion since the total buying bid on SBD/BTC was only around 3BTC worth, anyone who was able to buy low at bittrex and sell high on hitbtc would have made more than 3 fold certainly, averaging out all the available buying bids on Hitbtc. The possibility of 3x on 3 BTC worth in an instant is not something to shy on as well for a common trader such as myself.  

CHECKMATE BY REALITY 

The next step was to buy Steemdollars from Bittrex , deposit them into hitbtc, sell them and steemroll my way to the bank! But lo and behold, life never fails to disappoint. When anything sounds too good to be true, there is always a catch to it.  

As I was trying to obtain my Steemdollars deposit address on hitbtc, this was the screen I encountered.  

Dream Shattered.    

 More than 12 hours have passed since my first observation and here I am penning down my experience. As I steadily recover from the self afflicted small bout of depression, my mind could not seem to block out an endless stream of questions with regards to what I saw and what I continue to see as of now. Why is this happening to the price of Steemdollars? How is this actually taking place? Who are behind this?  What is their purpose?  

COMPARING THE PRICE CHARTS OF SBD/DOLLARS 

 While the gap in price has narrowed slightly over the past hours, there still exist an extremely large price gap of 19.7 times at the time of writing, 11th June 2018. Using SBDUSD price on Bittrex as the standard since the price on hitbtc is obviously an outlier, we can see that Steemdollars is generally on a downtrend over the past week.  

 Now, if we were to look at the steemdollars price chart over at Hitbtc:  

Instead of trending down over the past week, it looks to be trending up and even resembling a breakout. This is totally mind blowing to me. SBDUSD even traded to a height of over 140USD per steemdollar!! In most cases, even with a discrepancy in price, the token price trades in the same direction/ trend across exchanges.  

IS THE RECENT VOLATILITY OF BITCOIN THE REASON BEHIND THIS? 

Now doing a quick check against the sbd/btc pairs:  

  We see the BTC pairs strongly mirroring the usd pairs which is very much expected. The biggest point of contest remains, why is the steemdollar strength in HitBTC so much stronger than that in bittrex and the other exchanges?  

1. Why is the steemdollar wallet function disabled for new users? Coincidence? 
2. Are users with existing steemdollars able to trade on Hitbtc?  
3. Why isn't the trading of SBD/BTC halted in Hitbtc? Or why isn't the price corrected? 
4. What is the justification behind the higher price in HitBtc? 

Many questions remains.    

WHERE IS STEEMDOLLARS HEADING? WHAT ARE SOME FACTORS AFFECTING THE PRICE OF STEEMDOLLARS?

Based on my understanding from the research I have gathered, Steemdollars was meant to be pegged to the usd which is very clearly reflected in the historical price chart above. During the 2017 bull run, the peg was no longer maintained and from then on, it appears to be taking cues from the BTC just as how many other alternate coins are ( perhaps to a lesser degree)   

A quick comparison with the BTC chart and we can see that BTC definitely has been influencing steemdollars ever since the peg has not been maintained.  So where is steemdollars heading?  All eyes are on Bitcoin's price movement.  

In my next post, we shall investigate for signs of weakness and strength in Bitcoin, so do subscribe and follow me for more Bitcoin price analysis! 

Also, an important question arises. 

Now that steemdollars peg is not maintained, does that mean it may fall below 1 USD? What should we do with our steemdollars? 

ENDING NOTE

To my new Steemit Family, if you know the answers to any of the questions I have, especially why steemdollars is trading at such an exorbitant premium on Hitbtc, please leave your comments below and enlighten me. If any of you would like to discuss logical theories you may have, kindly comment below as well! For those who are as surprised as me, let us bring this to the attention of the seniors and crack this mystery.  

I look forward to hearing from all of you and am excited to share more of my thoughts in upcoming posts on Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technologies. 

Adios!   

中文版

SteemDollar价格差异2800％!! 套利可能吗？！？！

不可思议的分歧

大家好，这本应该是我的入门篇，但是当我在熟悉Steemit并且了解Steem，Steemdollars，Steem等等术语时，我遇到了这种大概罕见的情况，这让我感到惊讶，并随后抓拿了我所有注意力！

哪有人在电脑银幕上看到这些数据后不惊讶的啊！

Steem Dollars在HitBTC上的交易价格为44.15美元，而Upbit上的交易价格为1.56美元，Bittrex上的交易价格为1.53美元！ 这大约有2800％/ 28倍的差距！

在我们深入研究发生的事情之前，以下是关于代币价格差异的一些背景：

KIMCHI PREMIUM “泡菜保费”和一般的仲裁交易

各种交易所中代币的价格差异在密码领域中很常见。去年，在2018年1月下旬牛市崩溃之前，一种被称为“泡菜保费”的普遍现象允许普通交易者通过在美国/海外交易所买入低价的币，并在韩国以较高价格出售。这利用套利交易几乎同时进行交换，都不需使用高速频率策略和工具便能做到。

韩国证券交易所的代币价格可以高达40％的溢价卖出！尽管它偶尔会发生，但现在各交易所的令牌价格差异大多不足以让普通交易者获利，只有高速机器人交易（大批交易）才能进行有意义的套利交易。

您可以通过以下链接阅读更多内容：https：//www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kimchi-premium.asp

事实上，即使没有使用“泡菜保费”策略，套利机会也存在。

这是在2017年12月初，我和我的朋友通过在交易所间交易简单交易就能够快速获得10％的回报。在BITTREX 以463美元购买比太坊， 然受瞬间在 COINBASE以495 美元的价格出售。 

这次仲裁可能吗？

毫不犹豫地，我直接进入hitbtc.com的账户注册页面，注册了一个新账户并快速验证了平台上的价格。

当我看到上面的屏幕时，随着图表和订单簿的检查，我广泛传播。 我开始思考，这一定是我最幸运的一天！ 28倍等待瞬间！ 虽然要注意这事不应该被夸大，因为SBD / BTC的总购买价格只有大约3BTC的价值，任何能够以BITTREX  购买低价并在 HITBTC上卖得高的人都会赚取超过3倍 （平均出HITBTC所有可用的购买出价）。 立即在3 BTC上兑现3倍的可能性对于像我这样的普通交易者来说得来不易。

被自己整了

下一步是从BITTREX购买Steemdollars，将它们存入HITBTC出售，然后通过我的方式进入银行！ 但是，天不饶人。 当任何事情听起来太好以至于不真实时，总会有一个问题出现。

当我试图在HITBTC上获得我的Steemdollars存款地址时，这是我遇到的屏幕。

梦碎了。

自从我第一次观察以来，已经过去了12个多小。 随着我逐渐从自我困扰的小型抑郁症中恢复过来，我的思维似乎无法阻止关于我所看到的无穷无尽的问题。 为什么Steemdollars的价格会有此分歧？ 这实际上是如何发生的？ 谁在这背后做手脚？ 他们的目的是什么？

比较SBD /美元的价格图表

 虽然价格差距在过去几个小时内有所缩小，但在撰写本文时，2018年6月11日仍然存在19.7倍的极大差距。以BITTREX的SBDUSD价格为标准，我们可以看到Steemdollars在过去一周通常处于下跌趋势。

让我们看看HITBTC的steemdollars价格图：

过去一周没有下降趋势，而是趋于平稳，甚至出现类似突破。 这我完全无发理解。 SBDUSD甚至达到每steemdollar 超过140美元的高度！ 在大多数情况下，即使价格出现差异，令牌价格也会在交易所中以相同的方向/趋势进行交易。

BITCOIN最近的波动是在这之后的原因？

现在对SBD/BTC进行快速对比检查：

我们看到SBD/BTC强烈反映了SBD/USD。最烦人的问题仍然是：为什么HITBTC中的硬币实力比BITTREX和其他交易所强劲得多？

1. 为什么新用户禁用了steemdollar钱包功能？巧合吗？
2. 现有steemdlars的用户是否可以在HITBTC上进行交易？
3. 为什么HITBTC没有停止SBD / BTC的交易？或者为什么价格没有被修正？
4. HITBTC价格较高的理由是什么？

无法回答的问题仍然存在。

STEEMDOLLARS 前往哪里？影响STEEMDOLLARS价格的因素有哪些？

基于对我所收集的研究的理解，Steemdollars本意是与美元挂钩，这在以上历史价格图中非常清楚地反映出来。在2017年牛市期间，挂钩不再维持，从那时起，它似乎从BTC中获得线索，就如其他币（可能跟随程度较低）

与BTC图表进行快速比较，我们可以看到，自从挂钩未被维持以来，BTC肯定影响了steemdollars。那么steemdollars究竟前往哪里-->所有人都在关注比特币的价格走势。

在我的下一篇文章中，我将调查比特币强弱的迹象，所以请订阅并跟随我进行更多比特币价格分析,多多支持哦！

此外，还有一个重要问题出现。

现在stemdollars挂钩不维护，这是否意味着它可能会降到1美元以下？我们应该用我们的steemdollars做什么？

结尾

我的新Steemit家族啊！ 如果你们知晓我文章中里任何问题的答案，尤其是为什么STEEMDOLLAR在HITBTC上交易价格那么高，请留下你的评论并给我启发。如果你们中有任何人想分享你的逻辑理论，也请在一下评论！对于那些和我一样惊讶的人，让我们把这件事带到前辈的视线中讨论，并打试图破这个谜团。

我期待着大家的回复，并且很兴奋不久后分享更多想法。

再见！