I agree with this. But do you not think that the last price rise was because of a pump from the whales with ordinary people joining in with the hype of XEM? Look at the chart. What happened was clearly a pump and then there was a dump when it peaked. That hardly look like a chart of something that is achieving organic growth. Maybe it will come to NEM in the future I will not deny you that.
Sounds like the typical narrative of conspiracy misinformation on Bitcointalk. If there were really powerful whales behind NEM, then it wouldn't had fallen down to $1 million and $100 daily volume like it did in 2015. As for any theories about stealth buying - not possible when it had gutter trash volume for the longest time.
There was metrics at the time which indicated massive adoption in NEM in July 2016. NEM.io became a top 20,000 website in Japan. Address creation, according to the rich list, also shot up too.
NEM is seeing a slight resurgence at the moment. NEM.io is seeing an all-time high in popularity in Malaysia and the Japanese ranking has recovered to 45,000, when it had declined to 100,000+, which I suspect was due to BitGirls saying they would collect XEM in ICO.
It would be naive and stupid to think that there are no whales and traders manipulating the price of the coins dont you think? There are many gullible people in the cryptosphere and they follow all the hype and are made to think that "coin X" is the future. Also the volume of most of the coins are low enough to make it easy for them to manipulate.