I recently came across a competition on Steemit with the title ‘Win $20SBD ($70USD)’. This immediately interested me and led to do some research on this. Since I joined Steemit and read the FAQ I was under the impression that SBD was designed to be pegged to $1USD. This is actually the words that are used in the FAQ:

Source - Steemit FAQ

I decided to investigate by looking up the price of $SBD on Coinmarketcap. What I found was quite surprising to me - the current price of 1SBD is $3.57! Looking at the graph below we can see that the price of SBD was steady at around the $1 mark until around November 2017. This is the time that the alt market went crazy and everything was seeing massive gains. Steem is also becoming more popular and starting to gain more mainstream adoption. If we look at it from an economic standpoint when demand outweighs supply then the price must rise. As you can see at the peak of the boom SBD reached over $10 but as the market has slowed down it has fallen to its current price of $3.57

Source - Coinmarketcap

Working out the price of STEEM power

The following requires some maths but trust me it is not to complicated!
To work out our actual account balance in $USD we also need to know the price of STEEM power. I couldn't find any exact answer for this.

To gain an estimate of this we can look at my account. If we assume that 1 SBD = 1USD then we can work out the toal value of my STEEM power by subtracting my SBD from my total balance:
Value of Steem power in my account - 20.69 - 3.667 = 17.02

Now to work out the price of one STEEM power we can simply divide the value of STEEM power in my account (17.02) by the ammount of STEEM power (5.161) to gain an estimate of the price of STEEM power. From my account we can now esitmate the price of 1 STEEM power:

Estimated price of STEEM power = 17.02/5.161 = $3.29

My account balances on Steemit

Now if we go back to my account we can work out the approximate value in $USD.
STEEM power = 5.161 * $3.32 = $17.13
$SBD = 3.667 * $3.57 (price on Coinmarketcap) = $13.16

Therefore my estimated account balance in $USD is actually $30.29USD ($17.13 + $13.16) rather than the estimated balance of $20.69 Steemit suggests. This is nearly 32% more than the price listed on Steemit!

My estimated balance on Steemit - $20.69
My estimated balance in $USD - $30.29

Over time SBD might again be worth $1USD but it definetly pays to understand how much it is worth by periodically checking Coinmarketcap

I also suggest checking out steem.supply which gives an overview of your expected upcoming payouts (in $USD) .

Thank you for reading I hope you enjoyed