In the past I've always assumed that an SBD (or HBD) pump is designed as a play on Steem (or Hive).

Essentially:

• Pumpers accumulate Steem.
• Pumpers pump SBD since this can be done relatively cheaply given low market cap and the fact that they likely control a fair amount of the supply.
• Steem starts to go up because author payouts are now more valuable / vote values are higher / Steem has a higher APR and users fight to aggregate more Steem Power.
• Small impacts at first since only Steem users really notice.
• Pumpers circulate some profits from Steem into greater SBD pump.
• Steem rises again.
• Repeat circular steps above for a while.
• Steem rises to the point where traders start to notice and ape in.
• Moon pump.
• Exit stage left with profits.

Best activated during alt season since greater potential for speculation and moon pump.

So essentially SBD is a foot pump for a bigger play on Steem.

Why not just profit from pump on SBD?

I'm assuming pumpers control a fair amount of the SBD market and it's hard to attract other buyers into that market to hold their bags. So they lose money again on the dump.

But Steem has greater liquidity and they can attract the general market in to provide the liquidity they need to exit.

Something like this anyway. The pattern of SBD price movements suggest that the efforts are too long term and coordinated for simple pump and dump speculation.

I would assume the same play is being attempted on Hive.

Of course it's 100% speculation. But it's the season for it.