While everyone keeps have individual opinions and speculations on the next prices of cryptos, especially on the next altcoin season, I'll say we are moving nowhere because of price manipulation by exchanges. The actions of some exchanges is dropping the prices of tokens unnaturally and these affects market and industry confidence. How can we attract new money into the market when top wash trading exchanges like Bitforex and Bibox still exists and deceives people freely?
nobody cares about the volume numbers on no-name chinese exchanges. anyone who has been around this space longer than a few months knows the numbers are bogus.
and how is wash trading "dropping the prices of tokens unnaturally"?
Take this little assignment upon yourself;
1.) Open an account with Bitforex or Bibox, but most especially Bitforex.
2.) Fund it with a minor amount of BTC or ETH to trade.
3.) Pick any average token that has a BTc or ETH pair.
4.) Buy the sell 1 order, which will most likely increase the price of the token.
5.) Stay for about 5 mins on site and watch as their internal bot will trade down the price of that token.
This trading down occurs at intervals, if there are huge natural trades going on, you won't notice this and the exchange will be silently making money, but the price will be going up slowly or be about stagnant. This can be verified when you analyze exchanges with big real volumes like Binance and big wash trading volumes like Bitforex or bibox. Also, most times it is visible that wash trades are going on because you'll see orders which are short lived say few seconds on order book. Now when this goes on, your portfolio price doesn't naturally go down..it is manipulated down..If these exchanges trade the prices up, they would love money.