Today we noticed SBD was trading at a nice premium to Steem, but unfortunately we then checked what the price-history was on SBD by going to WorldCoinIndex and bringing-up a 7 day chart. This is what we found:

https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/steemdollars
If you're reading this 3 days from now, what you WOULD have seen is a chart of SBD rising from parity with Steem on June 13 to a high of almost $30 (THIRTY) on June 16, 3 days ago. What's amazing isn't a mooning of a cryptocurrency for an 1800% gain in 3 days; what's amazing IS the fact that a search of "Steem Dollar" or "SBD moon" or "breakout Steemdollar" doesn't yield anything on Steemit other than nonsense (which is pretty typical of a Steemit search, since Steemit search is absolutely awful and always has been). Where does one go to find out what happened last weekend with the price of SBD, bc Steem certainly didn't follow suit...
https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/steem
(Steem's chart just hanging between $1.55 and $1.80)

So we went to the king of search for answers: DuckDuckGo of course (too many ads on Google these days, so annoying), and here's all we could find when searching for all things of the past 7 days related to 'SBD' 'Steem Dollars' 'mooning' 'skyrocket' etc....

@japfive wrote "I can't do Steemit anymore":
In this article he mentioned "moon" and "steem dollar" but all this article was, was encouragement to keep Steeming along...
https://steemit.com/steemit/@japfive/i-can-t-do-steemit-anymore-1e306f76caf38
We're no closer to our answer.

@socky and @davidad both wrote yesterday about a campaign to get SBD listed on Binance, perhaps that is what drove the price?
But he wrote this "posthumously" about SBD which now says is trading at $2.37 (which is still a nice premium to Steem).
https://steemit.com/steemit/@socky/4kus6n-campaign-to-get-sbd-listed-on-binance
Binance activity MIGHT be some smoke here.

@majidawan wrote something about SBD & Steem mooning, but in broken english with a picture of "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" picture and zero content. What a Weird movie, and even STRANGER they made a lunchbox about this movie: https://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-1978-KING-SEELEY-CLOSE-ENCOUNTERS-METAL-LUNCHBOX-THERMOS-VERY-NICE/183249072653?hash=item2aaa7ef20d:g:rq0AAOSw4RZbDeSv
Yeah, THOSE are just $100 or more, wish we could have told some strange kids in 1978 how much their cruddy creepy lunchbox would be worth in 2018.

We struck out trying to find an explanation via search engines. If a cryptocurrency moons and no one writes about it, then it comes back down to earth, did it happen?

Since WorldCoinIndex shows SBDs at north of $2, let's even see if THAT is real, maybe it's WorldCoinIndex that's F'd up?
We go to Blocktrades. Blocktrades says today they'll sell us SBDs at 1.25 per Steem. Hmmm, that indicates SBDs are trading at a DISCOUNT to Steem, but that's not what WorldCoinIndex chart shows us! Now we're getting somewhere; there's a fly in the ointment. Let's try yet another REAL exchange (WorldCoinIndex after all, is a collection of prices from various indices but not an exchange itself); this time Steemit's "Market" (an internal market for buying/selling Steem and SBDs). It shows 1 Steem will get you 1.31 SBDs; again, SBDs trading for a DISCOUNT to Steem. Again we find the WorldCoinIndex chart to be off. So let's go back to it, and find out if we can figure out what's wrong with their prices!

WorldCoinIndex indeed shows SBD are worth $2.30 per SBD at the time of this writing, Tuesday. Up 10% mind you. But the nice thing about WCI, is they DO show you their sources for price information below the chart, here's what it looks like:

Exchange Pair Last price 24 volume
UPbit SBD/KRW $ 1.3088939 $ 304,587
Bittrex SBD/BTC $ 1.3073432 $ 31,026
Hitbtc SBD/BTC $ 24.810598 $ 14,810
Poloniex SBD/BTC $ 1.4907933 $ 2,687
Total / Average SBD/USD $ 2.2958568 $ 353,109

From this we learn a few things we didn't know before:

#1 Steem/SBD still mainly trade on Bittrex and Poloniex
This makes sense, as we're still seeing articles about people begging Binance (now the #1 exchange in the world) to list Steem.

#2 UPbit and Bittrex look correct, and Poloniex looks like it has no volume at all.
Somehow UPbit, which we've never heard before, is the #1 exchange for Steem Dollars? It exceeds Bittrex by 10-fold.
Poloniex is TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less significant than UPbit.

#3 UNITS AIN'T RIGHT, fam!
WCI lists all of these prices in SBD/BTC except UPbit which is in SBD/KRW. KRW, we believe, stands for Korean Won, the standard currency of South Korea. It turns out UPbit is built upon Bittrex's platform, but owned by South Korea's biggest communications app Kakao (who also runs SKorea's 2nd biggest search engine-- SKorea is well protected governmentally from superior American technology companies-- aka they cheat like New England Patriots folks!).
This would be like Snapchat partnering with Kraken to open up crypto-trading in the US, if the US didn't already have a well-established system by now. This UPbit started in September 2017 we BELIEVE. But for the purposes of OUR exercise, the UPbit price looks a LOT like the price we just got on two verified exchanges loosely or directly associated with Steemit itself. So SBD/KRW might not even be right. And that folks, brings us to the SOURCE and SOLUTION of our mysterious unmentioned case of the mooning SBD; namely, the Hitbtc price is listed at $24.81 which throws off WCI's index price for SBD--> HIGH. Notice all these other prices are in SBD/BTC which we think is wrong bc it's... well... WRONG. But in any case, in addition to NUMEROUS errors in units, WCI simply using what's most likely a fake SBD price of $24. HitBTC is registered in Hong Kong (now China), but not sure anyone knows a ton about it. Do you? Fill us in, on their history in the comments.

HitBTC and SBD:
HitBTC's website shows a bid/ask for SBD/USDT as 12.12 bid by 34.99 ask. So $24 is about right, but a spread like that means NO ONE is trading SBDs on HitBTC, and we think WCI's volume indicator is most likely wrong or a single trade went thru for about $14,000 by an unsuspecting "fat finger" (you can look that trading term up) account who didn't know any better and massively overpaid for a crypto. "Time & Sales" info has SBD not really trading since June 15, except two transactions which came in today, recently, for 10 SBD at $44.97 valuation. There's your culprit folks, a bad trade.

Do You Wanna Sell Your SBD for $44 per Steem Dollar?

Yeah, i BET you do. But it ain't happening, bc good luck finding buyers on HitBTC to keep up this madness. We're not saying it's not worth a try, but imagine the exit fees you'd pay just shipping your SBD across the Earth (Gaia) and back just to make a trade. We wrote this article as a lesson for y'all about this thing called LIQUIDITY. In markets and all things trading, liquidity is mucho importante. For instance, when the "music stops" on the world economy, you will find it very hard to trade anything, bc in extremes herds of animals simply stop doing a thing, like taking a risk on a quickly dropping asset. In other words, sometimes the price isn't important, it's the LIQUIDITY that's important. Remember this lesson for life. When you buy or own something, think about whether there may be a situation where no one wants to be on the other side of your trade. Oh wait, all you readers already know about this, it's called the world Real Estate market for homes in 2009. Lotta people asking certain prices reminiscent of the 2005-2007 home price highs, but no takers other than the truly desperate. That's what happened on HitBTC, no volume or liquidity, just some trapped poor sap paying the ridiculous spread price bc either he didn't know any better (he didn't know SBD was actually trading for > 90% discount to what he paid) or worse he was trapped on that website with no way to move his money without buying Steem Dollars.
That's what's going on with WorldCoinIndex's price of Steem Dollars this week (and it's still erroneous-- not reflecting actual liquid reality)-- a liquidity problem on BitBTC exchange-- and it might be "coming to a theater near you" with regards ALL asset classes someday sooner than you think.

source: HitBTC Steem Dollar prices...
https://hitbtc.com/SBD-to-USDT