In Theory Steem should be in a Death Spiral. Is it?

in #steemlast month (edited)

Edit: I'm dumb, I forgot about the haircut. This post can be ignored. With haircut factored in it's unlikely to be profitable I suspect.

Steem Dollars have been consistently depegged to the downside since early 2025.

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Now, while Steem has a substantially lower debt burden than Hive, in principle this depegging should be highly problematic for Steem inflation.

Rational actors can

  1. Purchase Steem Dollars at prices substantially below $1.
  2. Convert to Steem, locking for 3 days.
  3. Sell approx. $1 worth of Steem on the internal market, minus some slippage and risk factor.

Every time this happens, the real supply of Steem increases while reducing the supply of SBD. This should increase inflation, putting price pressure on Steem and eventually bringing the debt ratio down enough so that Steem posts start issuing SBD again.

Eventually either the SBD peg should be fixed at approx $1, or the supply of both SBD and Steem should just gradually increase at higher and higher rates.

I don't know where to get reliable stats on Steem any more to confirm if this is or is not happening, but does anyone have any insight into what is going on there? Have the rules been changed to prevent or mitigate this issue?

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In my view the price fluctuation of SBD is normal now. I have even seen its price at $4 and these days it is running around $0.5. I dont think its a big issue because the peg ratio of SBD broke a long time ago and its still doing fine.

SBD is no longer a stablecoin for people rather it has become volatile just like STEEM. Maybe Justin Sun is aware of all this and is controlling it.

Anyway nothing can be said for sure about what will happen with STEEM. Even our #HIVE coin is currently struggling 😌

It's amazing that it has any value compared to even $HIVE that has its own issues, but at least has some active development. I think a few people get most of the rewards over there, so maybe they manage to prop it up.

I honestly thought everyone left...lol.

They did, yet the token goes on. There may be things we can learn from undead chains.