If you look carefully at the coinmarketcap statistics for SBD, pictured in the screenshot above, you will notice a few strange things:

• on HitBTC, the SBD price is almost $12
• the volume on HitBTC is a little over $22,000
• the volume on HitBTC accounts for roughly 2% of the entire trading volume of SBD

Now, if you want to deposit or withdraw STEEM / SBD from HitBTC, you can't, because there is a "technical maintenance" going on.

So, under these circumstances, I consider the influence of the HitBTC price on the overall price to be negligible, and the fact that Coinmarketcap is still displaying it, very close to a bug. It's not technically a bug, but, given the fact that HitBTC has its wallet closed, it invalidates any arbitrage attempt, leaving the price prey to manipulation. Which is very easy to do, on just a $20,000 volume.

Normally, I think HitBTC should also stop trading if they have their wallet under maintenance, but that's another story. A story which reminds me of the early days of Poloniex, when they were suspending their wallets for weeks whenever there was a price bump, hence manipulating the price big time.

I decided it's better to use another price for my daily market snapshots, from Bittrex, which has the wallet open at the moment. I would advise anyone who is "happy" about the price increase of SBD to read this article carefully and not fall prey to market manipulations.

Steem on!

I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me Hive account@dragosroua.

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