You can't blame market manipulation or whales when your total volume for the day is a meager $50,000. That's just no one using or trading Darkcoin. Simple as.
I mean fuck, Dogecoin had over 13x the volume of Darkcoin today. It's like some bad joke
Precisely, and that is due to immaturity. We can't function as a true currency when it's accepted at so few locations. We can function, however, as a money transfer service, but those that need such services can't exchange so easily. And when the volume is up, it's due to speculation, not need.
All this will come in time.
And then the exchange services take a chunk out of everything making us less useful than we should be (fees for changing back to fiat)