Come on man... Here is my proposal for you:

Get the witness together, convince them to donate 65k steem total from all of them (and maybe other whales too), trade it for btc, buy the sbd ask book on Bittrex.

There. You have sbd price at 1 USD.

Then do whatever with the collected and (burn, donate, I don't care)

Isn't this way easier than pledging for funds that could go to another more attractive project?

Also, it would stop the potatoe nonsense on the trending ( also a front page for steemit)