There is a reasonable chance that the large institutions and whales were behind the recent
decline and have leveraged their vast clout in the market to take advantage of retail investors. It is very profitable when every trader relies on the same patterns and indicators and someone comes in and disrupts the market, pushing prices above or below what people expect. This is something Richard Wyckoff noticed over 100 years ago when he was working on Wall Street with financial giants like JP Morgan and Charles Dow. Back then, ordinary retail traders were constantly being undermined by institutions and big investors who would manipulate prices and essentially scare them away from stocks and commodities. To be clear, Wyckoff’s approach was not that large investors were conspiring together to manipulate the market; all they were doing was taking advantage of the market conditions they saw. In Wyckoff’s own words, they are following their own set of trading rules, rather than looking at behaviour or patterns, and they are simply looking for areas that are packed with investors waiting to buy or sell.

They know that most people who invest in cryptocurrencies are consumed by fear and greed. They know all the patterns that seasoned cryptocurrency traders are looking for and how to manipulate them out of their positions, even as the market bleeds and fakes fly, institutional investors are buying down, and as Alex Becker points out, over $5 trillion was pulled and put
back into the cryptocurrency market in just a few hours, which is not normal market behaviour, which is far more than retail investors could possibly afford, these are the footprints of compounders and institutional investors are playing by their own set of rules.

However, regardless of who exactly is buying/selling, the market, in general, is no longer selling coins at a loss – SOPR is showing a significant increase. In a bull market, SOPR resets to 1 and usually rallies immediately. The reason behind this is that when people think a bull market is in place, they rarely sell at a loss. The opposite is true for bear markets.

On the corporate side, both Apple and PayPal have hinted at future plans to expand their
cryptocurrency capabilities. The tech company posted a job opening for business developers in the alternative payments space. The job posting quickly became the talk of the cryptocurrency community as it said that 5+ years of experience in the cryptocurrency space or other
alternative payment space was required. Apple is looking for business developers with
cryptocurrency experience, leading many to speculate whether Apple Pay will look to support cryptocurrency payments.

PayPal will let customers withdraw cryptocurrencies. The company’s head of blockchain, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, announced at a conference that a cryptocurrency withdrawal feature is in the works. PayPal currently allows users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies within its app, and has also introduced ‘checkout with cryptocurrency’. This new feature will allow users to transfer their cryptocurrency holdings from PayPal’s platform to any third-party wallet, increasing the utility of their PayPal cryptocurrency holdings. Consumer interest in cryptocurrency payments is on the rise, and payments companies are gearing up for their own claims in the market. More payment companies are entering the space to capitalise on this growing demand. Visa and MasterCard have been adding to their crypto card portfolios, and FIS recently announced a partnership to launch a range of crypto debit cards in Europe.