We'd be remiss to think that the speculation is a result of anything happening on the platform itself. The timing of the airdropped Tethers and the bumps that many coins receive right after is too frequent to be mere coincidence. Most tethers are held by binance, bittrex, and poloniex, and guess where people send their SBDs and Steem? Yeah.
So maybe we should consider the fact that SBD/Steem have a true fiat pair on Upbit, and it's more than likely that there was a feedback loop generated between Tether money injection, conversions between Korean Won and SBD/Steem, and further bouts of speculation/pumping and dumping.
Right now there's a pretty clear pattern established I wrote in an earlier comment where they are cycling their money and pumping SBD, converting to Steem, pumping that, and dumping for cash or other coins until SBD cools off when they do it again. It actually happened again two days ago, SBD got pumped a little, dumped for steem, SBD slid, steem took off last night (look at the charts, obvious pump out of nowhere), and then slowly slid back down. If they continue to do this pattern the pumpers are making very, very good returns with little initial seed money needed to rig the pumping of SBD, and there are a lot of bag-holders being made along the way.
I think that any peg, hard or soft really puts you at risk for implosion. Tether is a systemic risk, many of the exchange coins and other peg coins are at risk, and has everyone forgotten the historical moments in time where pegs have wrecked entire economies in the real world? It's happened time and again. Don't peg unless you want to leave yourself exposed to yet another point of failure and collapse.