I've long thought this, but the events of the last couple days have made me almost certain it's what's at play.

The entire crypto market is being manipulated by the manipulation of the BTC market. 

The culprit?

### Sitting Limit Orders

<br>Think of all those limit orders sitting out there at any given time, all denominated in BTC, not fiat. 

So even if someone is still willing to pay the same amount for STEEM as they were the day before, in satoshis they will, but in USD they will pay far less if the price of BTC is being suppressed. 

As to whether parties who have entered the crypto space in force who are masters of market manipulation have the ability to do this, well just ask anyone who's been investing in precious metals over the last decade. Yeah, pretty effective. They know their game. 

I recently heard a CFTC official call for the introduction of derivatives into the crypto space so that it could be considered a sufficiently liquid market to be allowed into retirement accounts (which, btw, is not a decision the CFTC gets to make, thankfully). If that happens, forget about it. BTC will become a completely fake market that has nothing to do with market sentiment.

## Decoupling

<br>I took a look at the performance of the top 100 coins a few times between yesterday and today. What I saw again and again was that the altcoins recently introduced to Coinbase/CB-pro were not responding nearly as severely to the downturn in BTC as all other coins, save XRP (where I suspect other manipulation going on). Right now just about everything seems to be coming back, but 0x and BAT were up this morning when BTC was still dropping.

Why?

Well my guess is that they are no longer pegged directly to BTC. That means people are deciding what they are willing to pay for each coin in fiat, and whatever limit orders they had sitting there 2 days ago either filled at that price or are still sitting there. The movement of BTC had nothing to do with it.

## The Hope

<br>If this is the case, then what we would hope for would be that more and more coins would get fiat pairs on major exchanges, so that BTC would no longer be the one coin that can strangle the entire market.

They can't manipulate them all! But they can manipulate just a few, and especially just one or two (BTC and maybe ETH if they can get futures through for that). 

## What Do You Think?

<br>*Do you believe the BTC market is being manipulated?*

*Are you hoping for more involvement in the market by institutional investors?*

*Do you see liberation of altcoins from BTC as something that will make a big difference in the future of crypto, or not so much?*

![graph-3078540_1280.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmbgCdSXFpxJ59gqnQ4EGq9raNE51UNnwDm8t6URQg4gHc)
*[Source](https://pixabay.com/en/graph-diagram-recession-3078540/)*