All the time we hear from whale movements, how they buy, how they sell - however I find this behavior completely unnatural and suspicious. I don't want to push any conspiracy here, but I would like to share a few point why I believe crypto whales are not what you think they are.

Receiving/Sending crypto must not be Buying/Selling crypto

Most of the time we are looking on simple blockchain analysis, or simple: Receiving / Sending crypto to exchanges. This of course could be whales selling/buying, but it could also just be whales moving crypto around without interacting with the market.

Whale behaviour in BTC is unnatural

Bitcoin is a UTXO cryptocurrency. This means that balances are not on an address, but more that balances as "unspend" outputs belong to an address. What this means is: If you send 100 transactions to the same address, and later spend it, this address will still have 100 inputs. For this reason it would be best for privacy to accumulate the 100 transactions on different addresses, there is no benefit in fees to have them on the same address.

Yes, whales obviously don't have to care for fees. But that doesn't change the fact that almost any Bitcoin focused wallet today is designed to give you new addresses every time. This means whales actively decide to reuse the same addresses every time. I don't see any other reason for this other than the desire to be seen and noticed.

Or in other words; A Bitcoin whale could have more privacy with less effort.

How whales market manipulation could look like

An easy example: A whale holds 50k BTC but would like to get some more. Instead of buying he moves his Bitcoin to an exchange. The media now pushes how a whale just sold 50k BTC. The market panics and the prices drop. Now the whale can buy 10k BTC with his fiat (which is not trackable). Finally he deposits 45k BTC to his old address and 15k BTC to new addresses. The media will once again push how the whale just bought his BTC back lower, at a loss, and make fun of him. However it was actually impossible to witness what really happened at the exchange, in this example Mr. Whale just got a nice discount on his newest Bitcoins.

I'm not saying this happens every time, but it for sure could happen. From on-chain analysis it is actually IMPOSSIBLE to say what really happens on whale transactions.

Conclusion

I don't want to push conspiracies here. I'm not saying every whale transaction is faked. However whale behavior alone gives some evidence that they actively want to be seen by the public as whales and don't act natural. Together with the fact that onchain transactions are often perceived as buys/sells, which is simply wrong, makes manipulating a market actually extremely convenient.

The next time you read about a whale buying/selling a certain coin, read the article carefully. What did really happen? What observations were made and what conclusions are made from that? Most of the time there will be actually no sufficient evidence at all. And in doubt, just a lot of crypto was moved, nothing more or less.