A new year, new goals, new plans.... A review of my last year performance filled me with a mix of overwhelming experience with both up and down. I am alive and happy for where I am now.

Mostly there are lot of notable events happened in 2017 like China Ban, Japan official currency announcement, JP Morgan - BTC Fraud, paying BTC Salaries in Japan. Also well known game play by Crypto Whales in the market, alot to list here.

I would like to focus some light on whales today. There are good whales and bad whales too.

We all knew how crypto whales can influence the price and future of the coin. While crypto market heading to mainstream and gaining huge traction from all over the world. Cryptos have been added as a "must have in portfolios" for almost all financial investors. The other side of this was a little hard nut to crack for small investors because of the Whales.

For Noob's

"whale" a term usually refer to the very big players in the crypto space. They can influence the price of crypto by selling their holdings or buying more.

Let me give two real life incidents I faced and also many you who reading this

1.True story of many - BAT ICO

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Finally the day arrived. It's the day of our most interested crypto's ICO.
The count down 4...3...2...1.. BOOM!!

Copied the wallet address to deposit the crypto and waiting for confirmation...

At 10th-second, waiting...

At 20th-second, waiting...

At 30th-second, ICO COMPLETED and the project is fully funded

At 60th -second, confirmation still pending...

Finally, LOST THE BAT ICO. This is because the whole bunch of cake was grabbed by WHALES.

How do I know?

The BAT ICO raised $35 million from just 130 investors, of which 5 of them claimed over 50% of total BAT offered on crowdsale -newsbtc

See this Reddit thread: A frustrated user experience from BAT ICO
Similar ICOs had happened earlier. BAT has taken as an example for this post. Many ICO's ends with almost same results. They(whales) just threw lots of gas as fee where it would become impossible for a normal buyer to get onto the board. Now I will show you another daily trading example here...

2. BTC freefall $200 in 1 hour

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This is one of the old screencaps I'd saved for my trade review.

Many of you might be suffered the Bitcoin's freefall. In past, it(BTC-USD) dropped $200 in 4 hours and get back on the track again. There was no specific/confirmed reason behind it (if yes, please let me know)

Yahoo News: Bitcoin dropped $200 in an hour this morning

But!! Even though couple of events discussed above like China ban on BTC, BTC fork, etc. I believe that it because of WHALES. I hope many of you too agree with me.

Lucky me, I've just held my BTC till it rises back again. What if I start the panic (during the hot discussions of BCH) and sold at a bottom? Many did that and I feel pity for them. It's always a roller coaster ride here.

I suffered this many times with the tides of whale's swimming in this crypto space. We all knew what are whales and their capabilities. Just beaware..

Whats happening? - BTC Whales grabbing the altcoins and ICOs

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Most of the early Bitcoin miners are from China. Coz, their low production costs, in-house manufacturing units and cheap electricity and other factors drove the work force to establish a huge mining farms at early stages of Bitcoin. Now they all became whales holding very large amounts.

But why altcoins? Though they are good with Bitcoin?

To know that, we need to recollect the past a little bit. The time when china government took cryptos serious.

PBoC - People’s Bank of China: imposed rules on Bitcoin exchanges and tighten the grips on user identity & crypto holdings

Source: Coindesk.com

In my opinion, chinese are the biggest whales at the time of ban on Bitcoin. You can see the huge growth of trades with CNY pair at localbitcoins.com after the ban.

Source: Cointelegraph

So the problem is "Taxation" and "Privacy" with PBoC coz of holding Bitcoin. This made the whales to move their funds out of China and the obvious concern could be that their money should be in safe haven and also anonymous (not talking about anonymous transaction). Now this makes altcoins to the picture.

With altcoins they can hide their Bitcoins from Govt and can move out of China. By doing this, they can diversify the portfolio and they report their holdings lesser than actual to save on TAXES from being in the form of BTC. This doesn't applies to only Whales in China, but also the other whales with this kind of plans.

OK. But why the ICOs now?

After their investments been transferred to altcoins during the crowdsale, anyone can understand by seeing the price charts that minimum hold period derives to 2-3 months. During this period a great hype for those coins created due to the own performance of whales in ICO. This lead to grab the whole bunch of cake. Then natural buyers comes with their investments to buy them.

If a whale thinks to exchange for BTC or ETH? They do convert and wait for next promising ICO to be happen.Till then they keep their loaded guns warm and ready shoot.

Why I said next promising ICO? Here we go why....?

Do these whales genuinely supports the ICO projects and dev team behind?

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May be YES some times and NO many times. Today, It's no-brainer, everyone in this field knew about ICO's and their ROI.

Let's have a look at ICOstats which shows the enormous ROI after the investments made after the ICO.

You can see here the ICOstats (above screenshot) that NXT & IOTA performing the top in the list of greatest ROI vs ICO. Similarly there are many ICO's which given high returns to early investors and that's where whales are diving deeper.

Coming to the above point, Whale's genuine support the new altcoins and projects. Here I would like to take some data from ICOalert.com

They (whales) are very particular about choosing and here you can see that lot of ICOs are still pending to get fully funded. This is something to note and act.

This can be a strategy to multiply the investments, they grab the total crowdsale tokens at any amount of cost as fees (gas). The same what happened with BAT ICO and many of you lost it(including me). In the initial offering, one whale paid $2000 as fees in ether to make his trade worth $7 million to get through the ICO.

This appears to be bad! Yes it is...

This cutting natural investors to come aboard to support the project. I don't think these whales did their homework before investing in the project. They look for social validation and blast the crypto loaded Cannons in the market sale.

Usually, in earlier times, whales used to create the hype for their selected crypto and like to cash out that hype. Now the some of the whales are here on steemit platform using the strategy "Upvote me Upvote you", "Self upvote", etc. At the end of the day, Rich becoming Rich!!

I request the readers to give your opinion in comments to let minnows survive in these tides of Whales in crypto space.

Disclaimer: Please consider doing your own research before concluding to my views about whales are true here. Comment below for any interaction and sharing more views and experience.

Let's help each other

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