Doom, Gloom, and the SBD Debt Ratio

The whole Crypto world and STEEM in particular are getting smashed at the moment. So I thought I would express that the best way I know how, and that is with my photography. I took this shot on New Years eve in 2013 over the small coastal hamlet of Lennox head in NSW, Australia. Flames in excess of 20m were recorded and over 770 hectares of bushland was destroyed. Fortunately no homes or lives were lost as over 80 firefighters per shift, with support from helicopters and water planes fought the fires. Now back to STEEM and in particular what is happening with STEEM Backed Dollars (SBD) at the moment.

STEEM just touched down at 49 cents US which puts the market cap at about $143 million. As of this morning there were 14,088,101 SBD according to coinmarketcap.com which is very close to the 10% debt ratio which would break the SBD peg. This has implications on the stability of STEEM when SBD experiences a conversion run as people rush to convert their SBD before the peg fails. @buggedout did a good analysis of this here; and it seems in the past week close to 300k SBD are being burned per day into almost 600k steem and accelerating. This amount of STEEM hitting the market is putting a massive amount of downward pressure on the price which is already in a negative spiral, so the debt ratio continues to climb despite the reduction in total SBD.

Downward pressure on SBD effectively translates into leveraged downward pressure on STEEM (ie while the peg holds SBD selling pressure is converted to increased STEEM supply, so STEEM falls in value rather than SBD). Time will tell how this pans out; and if SBD holds or not. As holders of STEEM we are all essentially underwriters of SBD and the additional systemic risk of the stablecoin game we are playing whether we realise it or not. Yes SBD liability will always be capped at 10% of the steem market cap due to the way it defaults at the 10% debt ratio limit, however as the peg breaks and official blockchain conversion rates get lowered, it will damage the reputation of SBD putting further pressure on its price, and in turn put further pressure on STEEM. HF20 changed the sliding SBD printing cutoff from 2-5% to 9-10% of the STEEM market cap. At the time there was not a huge discussion around the downside economic stability impacts of such a change as the focus was on preventing another pump. So we are currently issuing more SBD right up to the default point at 10% allowing less breathing room for the SBD conversions to take supply side pressure out of the SBD market. Creating a whole new economic paradigm from scratch and tweaking the variables for stability is not easy !

In the mean time I am holding on to my STEEM; and hoping that this purge burns out a fair bit of dead wood while helping to even out the holding distributions a little. Lets hope the whole village does not burn down at the same time. There is lots of fundamentally amazing work happening in the background with STEEM at the moment with the transitions to a DApp based economy. Unfortunately in the existing speculation based economy we see in the crypto sphere price has little do to with fundamentals.

For those interested the shot was taken on a Canon EOS 50D, with at ISO 400 with a focal length of 280.0 mm (443.7 mm in 35mm), and aperture of f/4 with an exposure time of 1/160.

If you would like to learn a little bit more about my background in photography you can read the interview @photofeed did with me here