Institutional investors are playing always based in their favor. One I could not possibly disagree about this quoted statement below.
Wow! $3,451 billion is a huge sum! It's bigger than GDP of many countries! But when I look into the market cap of bitcoin, it is still standing at $167 billion only. Have you mentioned the number correctly??
I have been asking myself late back June of 2019, what could possibly an impact of bakkt and ETFs in Bitcoin market. And I found out, during September when Bakkt was announced to accept bitcoin futures without investors' basically owning physical bitcoin, price dropped.
Most of the whales before 2017 bull run were named before this few financial institutions; Citi, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Investment Banks, UBS AG, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs and etc. However, I am not doubt thay they had still this bitcoin in their purse til now. These whales are already buying physical bitcoin late 2017 before the bull run, so definitely, they are fully aware of the upcoming bull run and accumulated large sum of it.
In fact, as per observation, whenever institutions say about their participation in the market, price suddenly plummet( aside from external reasons like Plustoken dumping to liquidate stolen funds). And if you observed, bitcoin market right now is filled already with large whales and normally they are either financial banks or institutions like bakkt, ETF or Grayscale. These of course my motivation to wrote something about them, entitled
"Institutional Investors barred cryptomarket to retail investors".
All of these are tip of the iceberg. As to the current situation and questions why bitcoin liquidy still didn't rise as expected although institutions like Grayscale are holding huge amounts of BTC.
We could summarized potential conclusions here:
1. Grayscale, Bitcoin ETF, Bakkt and etc., are not meant to rise liquidity but only to create an impression that institutions are buying the idea of bitcoin. Investors here are not typically holding physical coin but rather only hedging with the price.
2.Since the market is already filled with mostly whales, market already adopts manipulation as majority of the players have common knowledge about it. So sudden price swing may be controllable.
3.Retail investors are the real players which will rise up the markets' liquidity.
Well if this will keep up price relation purposes.