If you have been invested in XRP or cryptocurrency for the past two years you will be acutely aware of the fact that the market is heavily manipulated.

If like me, you are not a billionaire you may be wondering how such rampant price suppression is tolerated or even possible.

It turns out not only is price manipulation easy to achieve for the people at the top, it has been going on for decades in most other markets out there.

Things are starting to get eerie as XRP is an asset class that is still in its evolution phase. Moreover, its sudden stability in price is completely opposed to its previous volatile characteristics. The prolonging stability of XRP around the $0.3 range is indicative of market manipulation. The suspected reason cited by Brandt is unloading of XRP tokens by whales who have kept the price momentarily. CoinGape/Peter Brandt

If we go back to the internet revolution of the late nineties/early noughties we start to see an explosion of the kind of market manipulations we see today.

Back then billionaire investors would tell the world that companies like Amazon were simply a bubble and would never last, while ‘shorting‘ Amazon stocks.

Today shorting has become an art form now we have institutional investors, internet billionaires and crypto whales who can drop the price by selling in volume.

To critics who say cryptocurrency is a bubble, I say those were the same people shorting Amazon in 1997 Brad Garlinghouse – See Video Below

So who are the whales, how are they able to affect the price so profoundly, what are their intentions and how do they get away with it?

Whales are investors with huge amounts of crypto or XRP who simply transfer vast amounts of the digital asset from one wallet to another.

These whales learned by moving their crypto, those lower down the pecking order sell off fearing those up the chain know bad news and the price would drop further.

These are the XRP sent from rEhKZcz5Ndjm9BzZmmKrtvhXPnSWByssDv to rLkMJhSVwhmummLjJPVrwQRZZYiYQhVQ1A (the wallet that sells Jed's XRP). When the XRP get there they always get sold so this is the amount of Jed's XRP being sold, compared to the daily CMC volume.@XrpCenter pic.twitter.com/cPZs5bD0Ap — Leonidas Hadjiloizou (@LeoHadjiloizou) November 16, 2019

The culmination of 2017 bull-run gave rise to scores of crypto millionaires and a few billionaires. Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple was one of the very few who made the list. On his exit from Ripple in 2013, McCaleb held 9 billion XRP & had signed a contract with Ripple to ensure that no huge XRP dumps would take place. However, there have been allegations of McCaleb selling hoards of XRP AMB Crypto

Following claims from the XRP community that Jed McCaleb dumps his XRP holdings for profit thus dropping the price, Twitter XRP legend Leonidas looked into it. He found by comparing daily sales of XRP by regular folk and times Jed has sold his XRP the stats show his sales are not enough to drop the price as much as feared. While Leonidas’ comparison lets Jed off the hook a little, his sales certainly affect XRP price, anyone with around 10 million XRP or more can do exactly the same. This combination of people who understand the market and hold enough XRP or crypto can easily cream off the profits from our relatively small investments. Perhaps now your questions are, can this price suppression ever be stopped, when will it stop and what if anything will be the factors to stop this trend? Yes it can and prices will rise once again, Ripple still faces a lawsuit which is to be heard in Jan 2020, many institutional investors will wait for this ruling. Some mainstream money awaits regulations and clarity regarding the SEC decision, whichever way that rules means very different things for tax considerations. Investopedia – ‘market manipulation refers to artificially inflating or deflating the price of a security’ perhaps why authorities are holding back while filling their bags? The figures thus support a hypothesis that the bitcoin price is manipulated in advance of CME settlement. These futures contracts are optimal for manipulation. They are settled in dollars and not in bitcoin. The price for the settlement is determined by the bitcoin price in the underlying market. Thus, it is never actual bitcoin that change hands, and it is just an overlying market traded in dollars Bitcoin Manipulation – Forbes/Arcane Research It will be mainstream/institutional billions that send will XRP’s value way over its current measly but respectable 11.2 Billion market cap. No one knows when XRP will explode in value but it will, at XRP Ripple News we simply link the factual dots and allow readers to see how huge XRP will actually be. In a rather funny Coil blog, the author claimed the @Ripple team had announced CTO David Schwartz would be down for maintenance for approximately one day. Thankfully Schwartz came forward to let the XRP community know he was quite ok and not in need of routine maintenance following a good service in Japan.