The price of steem is likely about to go for a ride and we can thank our friends in South Korea.
You may have been wondering why the price of steem has been up the past few days, well here is likely the reason why...
Bithumb announced that they would be re-enabling steem wallets in mid-January.
This was confirmed even more when this update was put out by Bithumb late yesterday:
The target for that resumption is roughly 3 am EST tomorrow morning.
Why is this significant?
If you look at the market place for steem currently, you will see that steem is currently priced at $.95 on Bithumb and priced at roughly $.38 on every other exchange.
That means that when Bithumb officially re-enables steem wallets, people are going to start furiously transferring steem into Bithumb trying to sell it for that $.95 price.
The resulting price action will probably be that of a falling price on Bithumb, possibly rather drastically.
However, it might also lead to a rising price on all the other exchanges as people buy steem on those exchanges and try to sell it on Bithumb.
A sort of "meet-in-the-middle" type of event between prices.
Then when you get traders jumping in on the momentum, who knows what happens to the price of steem.
How do I know this has been happening?
If you look at the recent price movement of steem you will see that just about all the volume is taking place on the Upbit exchange, which is also a South Korean exchange (like Bithumb).
Most likely when people got wind of steem wallets being re-enabled and prices being 3x-4x higher on Bithumb, they went out and bought up all the steem they could on Upbit with hopes of selling them for higher prices immediately when Bithumb re-enables.
This is a major arbitrage opportunity for those with a quick trigger finger.
Unfortunately most people reading this on Steemit.com won't be able to try and take advantage of this opportunity because you need to be a South Korean in order to have an account on Bithumb, well at least have a South Korean phone number.
That, and also the arbitrage opportunity will likely close in a matter of seconds as exchanges will take full advantage of it when it opens.
However, who knows what that might do to the market price of steem globally.
We are likely to find out within the next 12 hours...
Stay informed my friends.
Follow me: @jrcornel
Very interesting. I was wondering what was driving up the price of Steem.
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This is likely the reason.
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Those are great news
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We will see what happens later tonight and early tomorrow morning. Hopefully good things.
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Anyone seen a rally? 😩😩😩
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We had a nice move from about $.27 up to about $.43 or so. :)
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Awesome investigative work, @jrcornel.
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Thank you. No fireworks, but perhaps the fireworks was the run up from $.27 to $.42 leading up to the event.
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I'm almost sure ned have the South Korean phone number, hehe.
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Haha, he probably does... Hopefully he is quick on the trigger! It will happen fast.
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Wow. This sounds like a great news and hopefully this will work and rise up the price of steem even more.
Thank you so much for this exciting update and looking forward to hear more from you, hopefully in the next few days.
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It will be interesting to see how things play out tonight.
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I'm glad you spelled the real reason for the price pump. It has been aggravating the hell out of me that people are posting that the price pump was due to @ned showing up. All that does is spin a bunch of newbies into some false idolization of someone that had nothing to do with the price pump and, in my opinion, doesn't deserve the credit.
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Completely agree. He is more likely to be dumping right now and helping push prices down then he is to be doing anything positive to help push prices up.
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I was planning on buying more Steem on Friday so I hope there is a downward correction by then!
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There very well may be... See what happens tonight/tomorrow.
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Actually I was also thinking to try it out but I am not a south Korea. Anyway I am happy the steem price is rising up back and I hope it
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Then you likely won't be able to, though if you have a friend over there...
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Pretty sure you can sign up for bithumb even if you’re not from South Korea or have a SK phone # fyi ;)
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The last time I tried I was not able to complete the sign up process and trade any currencies on the platform without it.
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Hmmm, that's odd. I think I just went to the english site and then I had to get verified etc. It all took very little time if i recall correctly.
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@jrcornel Thank you for your time, and your great news.
Hope you have a successful week.
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I have an account with Bithumb since a week or two and I'm in Ireland...
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Interesting. When I tried to create an account it asked me for a South Korean phone number to complete the registration.
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When I registered, it had a drop down list with all the countries. I just checked and that's still the case. It asks to fill out the country first, and then you fill your phone number. They do ask to verify your identity though, but I did mine and it was sorted in about 5 hours after 3 tries because the photo was not accepted twice. Other than that, I had no issues.
Here, I checked to sign up with another browser and this is what comes up:
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Ahh exactly i just mentioned this lol...
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Are you guys from the US and were you able to actually buy and sell any currency on the platform? I wasn't able to buy or sell anything without verifying my account, which I could not do.
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I'm from Canada. Maybe there is an issue with US? Although the site has a US flag on it indicating = English Version.
I've yet to trade on there simply bc prior to today i was unable to send Steem. I do have a small balance of KRW which I appear to be able to purchase with. Will let you know when I make a trade tho.
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Cool, thanks. Yea if I recall, I was able to make an account but I wasn't able to do anything with it.
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I'm Dutch but living in Ireland @jrcornel. Had no issues verifying with an Irish drivers license. From what I understand only verified accounts can withdraw. Haven't traded yet, but was able to transfer some BTC to the account.
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What can I say @jaybird? Great minds...😉
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Lol. Funny how nothing really happened in the end. Expect the unexpected i guess...
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And yes, looking like the fireworks was the run up from $.27 to $.42 leading up to the event.
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Definitely, I had a feeling not much would occur lol.
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Well, Steem went up to 40 cents and down to 40 cents on Bithumb...that's something right? Now, if we just ALL don't expect Steem to go to $50,- then maybe the unexpected will happen? 😜
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Ya, something occurred leading up to the whole bithumb reinstatement of the steem wallet. Steem went up against BTC which is notable too.. Not sure what it means exactly.
And yes definitely. I don't expect Steem to Hit 50$ anytime soon, but better get those sell orders in place just in case right ;)
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What was the reason for the suspension of the wallets in the first place?
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Good question. They been offline for a long time now though. Usually has to with a hf or some update and exchanges not keeping up.
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Wow, this was some awesome info that explains a lot of what has probably been going on with the price of STEEM lately. It's always so hard to know if the information you are reading is coming from a legitimate source, but like I said, this makes a lot of sense.
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Yep. A lot of people had been attributing the price action with what has been going on with @ned and steemit,inc. However, I highly doubt it. This is the reason.
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Makes sense!
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Yes, this makes a lot of sense. I was perplexed by the price action in light of all the drama lately. But this seems the most likely reason. Thanks for sharing mate. Let’s hope this uptrend can be continued.
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So far, it is hanging in there.
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Great to see. Has the steem wallet been re-enabled already?
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Yep 3 AM EST this morning.
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Great. Cheers mate.
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I couldn't take advantage as my Steem is powered up anyway :)
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Yes, there is that as well.
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So, do you think that there are still active buy orders in the orderbook over at Bithumb? Even though the Steem wallets where disabled I can't imagine that the last price of 0.95$ is still in the orderbooks.
I guess most users will fail to catch any buy orders at Bithumb when the market was inactive for so long time. But the good thing is we have another big exchange for Steem so overall positive news!
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Well trading has been going on over there the whole time still... at least by someone.
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Indeed i’ve been watching and waiting lol
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The majority of the token's prices are based on speculation, not on fundamentals, so you could be right.
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god bless the south koreans .. now all we have to do is get some more scandanavians interested in STEEM and the world will be ours !! thank u techno vanguard countries (-:
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The more the merrier!
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Looks like i made my comeback to steem at a great time. 😁 SBD being printed again and all this price action. I wasn’t even aware of everything going on just wanted to make a steem comeback. Going to grab the popcorn and some beer and enjoy the show this next 12 hrs.
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Nothing too exciting. Looks like the move up from .27 to about $.42 at the peak was the fireworks.
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All that popcorn for nothing.
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I am interested to see how the exchange will handle the volume as they have really only held about 1.5 million Steem in their wallet and that number can change drastically with this update. It could definitely lead to a bottleneck in demand which could drive prices higher.
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Looks like they handled it like a champ. Price adjusted almost immediately as expected. Looking like the fireworks was the move from $.27 to about $.42 at the peak which happened leading up to the event.
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Bithumb is currently 2.5% of the global STEEM volume. So we can say the arbitrage opportunity will be filled very quickly.
If you're right and the STEEM pump is due to traders buying STEEM outside Bithumb for the arbitrage opportunity, then a lot of them are going to be quickly disappointed and are going to sell. That means we will see a nice dump in the next 24 hours.
Or it might be another reason... Popcorn time!
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Check out how much it is now. Roughly 20%.
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With Upbit + Bithumb it's 80% of the volume coming from Korea. Might be Samsung rumors in full swing?
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I would guess just run of the mill market manipulation and arbitrage.
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15 years ago when I started working with South Korean companies, I had to fill a lengthy form that included asking for South Korean phone number. I just changed one number in area code and it worked... About 10 years later they started actually verifying the phone numbers and I couldn't transfer money to my account anymore... Maybe one day I will ask my Korean girl friend to transfer my own money to my account using her phone number, but so far she prefers I buy her something from European shops and re-mail to her Korean address. The prices here are so much lower that even with re-mailing and the customs, it's worth the extra trip.
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Might be worth the try at some point.
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I have so many friends in South Korea that it wouldn't be hard for me to ask them to buy a cheap phone and new SIM card just so I could transfer money. So far using other exchanges has been enough for me. I can't ask them to just buy the SIM card as they use non-standard text messaging system.
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I will say, it'll be interesting to follow. I do like the acquisition rate of STEEM nowadays so I'm not too excited. That said, to answer your question from not too long ago, I believe the friend I thought of is using something called BITMEX to short BTC and the like. I did not look into it, but finally found the answer the other night.
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Yes Bitmex is one of the best exchanges to use for shorting, unless you are a US resident. Closed to US residents.
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I didn't know that! You think there's a way of feigning residency elsewhere? I'm certain my friend's from PA.
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Yes there are ways around it using a VPN I believe.
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!tip
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Haha, cool! Thanks!
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🎁 Hi @jrcornel! You have received 0.1 STEEM tip from @doitvoluntarily!
@doitvoluntarily wrote lately about: Following Cannabis Legalization Black Market Still Thriving Feel free to follow @doitvoluntarily if you like it :)
Sending tips with @tipU - how to guide :)
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Isn't it only worth .95 on buthumb if people want to pay .95 on bithumb. Surely they will get to cancel their buy orders first. Koreans can already buy Steem all over the place, like upbit, and there are plenty of Koreans who do. Bithumb unlocking is not the reason.
My theory....some Korean incubator is having their star startup buy directly off steemit or ned to avoid market changes. Korean networks are tightly controlled with real name ID verification so naturally platforms that respect privacy like Steemit appeal to them and they need more korean developers on steem.
PS There is a large korean conference happening this week...maybe some announcements.
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