Steemprices.com is showing the wrong prices and why you can't make 30% profit arbitraging Steem Dollars
Everything with Steemprices may seem alright? Well, it isn't.
As you can see on image above there are 3 prices. Two for external exchanges and one for Steemit Internal Market.
You may ask:
But wait a moment, These price diferences are very big, why not buy Steem on Internal Market for $2,83 and sell on eg. Poloniex for $3.69? About 30% difference, Looks like a great opportunity for fast profit.
But wait a second before selling your house, car, cat or wife.
If you think a little more you will conclude that it doesn't make any sense. Steemprices is highly popular, there are a lot of articles on Steemit about this price difference and basically a lot of people know this. So why prices still remain the same?
You guessed right: there's something wrong with Steemprices.com
If you look on this image (Internal Market screenshot), you can see that price for 1 Steem seems to be the same as on SteemPrices.com. That's not right.
Price on internal market is given in Steem Dollars, not US Dollars. You can't get 1 SD (Steem Dollar) for 1 USD right now. The price of 1 SD is about $1.3.
There may come another question: So, what is real Steem price on Internal Market?
Highest bid you can get for Steem is (as of time writing this article) 2.832942 SD
1 SD = 0.00193473 BTC, then price of 1 Steem = 2.832942 SD * 0.00193473 BTC = 0.00548097787 BTC
1 BTC = ~$665, then price of 1 Steem = 0.00548097787 BTC * $665 = $3.64485028355
1 Steem ~$3.65
And how SteemPrices should look like:
I've spent some time on this post and I hope it won't drown among other posts.
If you enjoyed my content, please upvote:)
@tomcio2001 thanks for telling us about this! For the internal market, we are assuming 1 steem dollar is 1 usd dollar equivalent. We will make a note for the next version's release. That's why on foreign steem dollar market on polo and bittrex you see higher or lower than $1.00 price.
I read the post but still a little confused is there room to profit from price difference or is it just a glitch and the prices are the same?
Yes and not, You can profit from price difference but as you can see on the last image it's just about 1% of profit. Taking in account market volatility risk and transaction/exchange fees it's almost non profitable.
Useful information, thanks for posting this. I wonder if there will be more arbitrage opportunities down the road with the SD prices get closer to actual Steem price on the exchanges.