It's always struck me as weird that pumpers could make money out of pumping SBD. At some point in the pump they have to convince the market to buy in and provide the liquidity they need for their exit. Typically the (unspoken) argument is - "Hey, this coin is taking off, buy in, FOMO". But that doesn't work if everyone actually knows the coin is just going down again.

Maybe there's some money to be made pushing the coin then selling on the way up. But it just feels really thin. Plus there are much better choice of coin if people want to do this.

But if you can pump a 5m dollar market and move a 50m dollar market, it starts to make sense. The pump probably costs money. But the holdings of the larger coin provide the profits, plus the liquidity for the exit, since the larger coin has more FOMO appeal when it moves, and the pumpers holdings are a smaller proportion of the larger coin supply.

So here are the SBD pumps in November:

Three SBD pumps, each a week apart, when Steem was at rock-bottom prices (the next SBD pump was a week later on 1 Dec).

And here's the movement in Steem in November / start of December:

From the above:

• The movements / pumps line up across SBD and Steem.
• The pumps are each a week apart.

Of course there can be different interpretations of these movements and the reasons behind them.

But to me this suggests SBD is pumped as some kind of play in getting Steem moving upwards. With some kind of connection to the weekly payout cycle.

Steem is now at $1.15 rather than $0.15. A group holding 10m Steem (3% of total supply) would now be sitting on $10m of paper profits. Since it's only 3% of supply there's a good chance to actually realise those profits in the market.

There would be a cost in pumping and racheting up the price of SBD. But with only 6-7m SBD in total the cost should be covered by the profits.