SBD whales were gonna buy giant chunks of STEEM in the internal market
There are no SBD whales, at least not within the community. Everyone here has just seen the SBD pump as an opportunity to grab some extra money by selling it off to speculators. When the speculators are done, they won't be using it to buy STEEM on the internal market, they will just dump it for BTC or fiat on an exchange and move on to the next game.
I shudder to think how much liquid STEEM and SBD sits in Poloniex and Bittrex
Essentially all of it (at least 80% if not more), because it has lost its utility for anything other than price speculation. There used to be people on this platform who held it for its price stability on this chain rather than cashing out, and services on this platform which used it as a stable value token for buying services. Nearly all of that is gone, with nearly all SBD drained off to exchanges for speculation. At least for now, hopefully we can soon get that utility back and more in the future.
I used to use @tipu often because it was fun. Now, the price is just too high and the value of my tip is too unknown. It's quite sad, really.