The price of steem is likely about to go for a ride and we can thank our friends in South Korea.
You may have been wondering why the price of steem has been up the past few days, well here is likely the reason why...
Bithumb announced that they would be re-enabling steem wallets in mid-January.
This was confirmed even more when this update was put out by Bithumb late yesterday:
The target for that resumption is roughly 3 am EST tomorrow morning.
Why is this significant?
If you look at the market place for steem currently, you will see that steem is currently priced at $.95 on Bithumb and priced at roughly $.38 on every other exchange.
That means that when Bithumb officially re-enables steem wallets, people are going to start furiously transferring steem into Bithumb trying to sell it for that $.95 price.
The resulting price action will probably be that of a falling price on Bithumb, possibly rather drastically.
However, it might also lead to a rising price on all the other exchanges as people buy steem on those exchanges and try to sell it on Bithumb.
A sort of "meet-in-the-middle" type of event between prices.
Then when you get traders jumping in on the momentum, who knows what happens to the price of steem.
How do I know this has been happening?
If you look at the recent price movement of steem you will see that just about all the volume is taking place on the Upbit exchange, which is also a South Korean exchange (like Bithumb).
Most likely when people got wind of steem wallets being re-enabled and prices being 3x-4x higher on Bithumb, they went out and bought up all the steem they could on Upbit with hopes of selling them for higher prices immediately when Bithumb re-enables.
This is a major arbitrage opportunity for those with a quick trigger finger.
Unfortunately most people reading this on Steemit.com won't be able to try and take advantage of this opportunity because you need to be a South Korean in order to have an account on Bithumb, well at least have a South Korean phone number.
That, and also the arbitrage opportunity will likely close in a matter of seconds as exchanges will take full advantage of it when it opens.
However, who knows what that might do to the market price of steem globally.
We are likely to find out within the next 12 hours...
Stay informed my friends.
