Steemit Business Intelligence: How SBD Price Movement Changing Trading Behavior

Both Steem Dollar and Steem are moving in the upward direction lately. The SBD movement has created tons of opportunities for content creators to make more out of their posts and comments. I plotted the chart below to identify the inflection point when Steem Dollar really started to make the big moves.

Based on this chart, the upward trajectory of Steem Dollar really started happening at the start of December. The data from this chart was taken from coinmarketcap.com's historical data feature. I took the data for the closing price between November 16 till December 15.

Delimitation

This will be a comparative analysis on buying and selling behavior of Steem Dollar between the period of November 16-30 (15 Days), and December 1-15 (15 Days). This analysis will only cover Steem Dollars that were sent and received within the Steemit platform, and will not look at the trading behavior using Steem Dollar paired with other coins in outside exchanges. I will also make a comparative analysis using the same periods to highlight the difference in the count of transactions executed in Steemit's Internal Currency Market.

I used arcange's Steem SQL Public Database to acquire the data-points related to sending and receiving Steem Dollar, and the Internal Currency Market's trade count.

The data is further delimited to only the top 20 receivers and senders, which accounts to no less than 85% of SBD spent/received in any of the data-points presented.

Methodology

I ran this SQL query to get the data related to sending and receiving Steem Dollar for Nov 16-30 and Dec 1-15 periods:

SELECT *
FROM TxTransfers (NOLOCK)
WHERE amount_symbol in ('SBD')
AND timestamp>= CONVERT(datetime,'11/16/2017')
AND timestamp< CONVERT(datetime,'12/1/2017')

SELECT *
FROM TxTransfers (NOLOCK)
WHERE amount_symbol in ('SBD')
AND timestamp>= CONVERT(datetime,'12/1/2017')
AND timestamp< CONVERT(datetime,'12/16/2017')

To get the count of transactions in the Internal Currency Market, I used this query:

SELECT
DATEADD(DAY, DATEDIFF(DAY, 0, timestamp), 0) AS [year_month_date_field], >COUNT(amount_to_sell) COUNT
FROM TxLimitOrders
GROUP BY timestamp

I then plotted the data-points in an excel spreadsheet to create the charts and visually present the data.

The Analysis

There was a total of 2,006,856 Steem Dollar sent/received for the period of November 16-30, while for the December 1-15 period 1,839,605 Steem Dollar were sent/received.

The 2 charts below shows a categorized distribution of receivers of Steem Dollars.

There isn't much difference from these two chart except for the 2% that moved from being received by users between Nov 16-30 were sent to exchanges between Dec 1-15. You will see that the % distribution for Steem Dollars received by users was 14% and 11% for Nov 16-30 and Dec 1-15 respectively; 82% and 84% for Nov 16-30 and Dec 1-15 respectively were sent to exchanges. In terms of distribution, there is 1% increase for the share of Steem Dollar received by the Upvote Bots, in actual spending to pay for upvotes, users spent 4,900 Steem Dollar more in the Dec 1-15 period.

Here are the data used in tables for the Top 20 receivers of Steem Dollars:

Nov 16-30 Steem Dollar Receiver

Account Name	Category	Amount Received
bittrex	Exchange	1,015,671
poloniex	Exchange	320,815
blocktrades	Exchange	89,618
happychau123	User	82,129
smooth-a	User	76,100
enki	User	32,757
changelly	Exchange	30,710
minnowbooster	Upvote Bot	29,136
buildawhale	Upvote Bot	14,936
neoxian	User	11,413
freedom	Delegator	11,203
paco-steem	User	10,950
cryptomancer	User	10,731
appreciator	Upvote Bot	8,608
booster	Upvote Bot	7,501
themarkymark	User	7,404
buildteam	User	7,093
furion	User	7,000
coinpayments.net	Exchange	6,151
hitbtc-exchange	Exchange	6,032

Dec 1-15 Steem Dollar Receiver

Account Name	Category	Amount Received
bittrex	Exchange	1,010,435
blocktrades	Exchange	199,648
poloniex	Exchange	78,158
chrisx	User	50,917
happychau123	User	39,583
teamsmooth	User	23,722
lammpi	User	19,714
changelly	Exchange	19,087
minnowbooster	Upvote Bot	18,969
themarkymark	User	15,158
buildawhale	Upvote Bot	15,094
appreciator	Upvote Bot	13,984
hitbtc-payout	Exchange	12,388
cryptomancer	User	10,377
freedom	Delegator	10,215
upme	Upvote Bot	8,628
hitbtc-exchange	Upvote Bot	8,444
booster	Exchange	8,257
alot	User	7,795
paco-steem	User	6,181

The next two chart will show contrast on sending Steem Dollars for Nov 16-30 and December 1-15.

The contrast is clearer in these two charts. These show that there are significantly lower distribution of Steem Dollars being sent from the exchanges from Dec 15. In amount, there were 429,000 less Steem Dollars that came in from exchanges in Dec 1-15 compared to Nov 16-30. Majority of the Steem Dollar coming out of users' wallet were sent to exchanges.

The 1% (12,600 SBD) increase in Steem Dollars coming out of Upvote Bots' wallet is mostly from buildawhale going to it's operator themarkymark.

Here are the data used in tables for the Top 20 senders of Steem Dollars:

Nov 16-30 Steem Dollar Sender

Account Name	Category	Amount Sent
poloniex	Exchange	464,995
bittrex	Exchange	324,549
happychau123	User	183,638
blocktrades	Exchange	112,647
smooth-a	User	79,500
smooth-f	User	75,100
paco-steem	User	33,895
changelly	Exchange	30,218
minnowbooster	Upvote Bot	29,909
enki	User	24,176
pentahedron	User	22,500
cyrano	User	19,150
furion	User	16,427
openledger-dex	Exchange	13,026
kaylinart	User	11,332
mika	User	10,674
dollarvigilante	User	10,669
sweetsssj	User	10,036
cryptomancer	User	10,000
appreciator	Upvote Bot	8,346

Dec 1-15 Steem Dollar Sender

Account Name	Category	Amount Sent
happychau123	User	246,808
blocktrades	Exchange	202,082
poloniex	Exchange	190,486
bittrex	Exchange	80,742
imadev	User	71,103
chrisx	User	53,897
paco-steem	User	34,309
teamsmooth	User	23,800
teamsmooth-mm	User	23,222
minnowbooster	Upvote Bot	21,656
azeroth	User	20,950
lammpi	User	19,702
changelly	Exchange	18,392
enki	User	16,991
buildawhale	Upvote Bot	15,097
cryptomancer	User	14,932
appreciator	Upvote Bot	14,136
hitbtc-payout	Exchange	12,446
hitbtc-exchange	Exchange	12,388
rocket.chat	User	11,895

The other part of this analysis is to highlight the significant increase in the count of transactions done in the Internal Currency market as shown in the chart below.

The count of transaction in the Internal Currency Market almost doubled in the Dec 1-15 period when compared to the previous 15 day period (Nov 16-30).

Conclusion

With the significant upward movement of Steem Dollars, Steemit content creators are getting rewarded a higher amount in fiat, this encourages behaviors around either cashing out specially now that we are approaching the Christmas season. For the cryptocurrency enthusiast and traders, the earned Steem Dollars are providing additional capital to enter or add to existing positions. I personally bought in to LTC during the recent move with earned SBD, but brought the money back to Steem after the trade. I know of other traders who've done the same. This means that while some value may be leaving the platform for good, some are actually coming back from value earned from trading other coins.

Most of the users in the Top 20 lists of senders and receivers are either active Internal Currency Market participants or Market Maker groups. The recent movement in the price of Steem Dollars coupled with the increased participation in trades using the Internal Market is increasing their profitability.

For the Upvote Bots and their users, the profitability of the scheme has also increased. A lot can happen in seven days however, between paying with your precious Steem Dollar for an upvote to the reward payout.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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