It's just the whales keeping the price down so they can buy more.
From my experience, when people start saying that the coin is dead.
Its an idiotic thing to say anyway - to artifically keep the price down you would have to be selling more than you buy, so you are saying that these 'whales' are selling coins because they want to buy coins, which is clearly foolish.
What if they sell into their own buy! Just kidding ofc.
I don't believe that the marked is being manipulated in any big way, If so I believe that the volume would show it.
I think XC price is down because of the following factors (not in order):
Mintpal crash
Bitcoin Price
Potential alt-coin marked disrupters like Ethereum and bitcoin side-chains.
Not being shown on Bitcoinwisdom
Successful paid FUD Campaign followed by drooling losers continuing FUD on the BTCTalk Thread
Many new initiatives but few deliverables lately, more specific:
New UI
Mobile Wallet
Blocknet - XBridge
B2B hinted recently
Of those above I think from a buyers perspective price is looking good. (I just increased my holding 20% back up to pre-blocknet release)
* New UI won't rock price much, it is an important feature but not a differentiator, if it has any impact it will be price stabilization
* Mobile Wallet, initially won't have much impact as it is not a differentiator but could be an enabler of the following.
* Blocknet, Will be big, I predict that if Blocknet launches with a XBridge BTC wallet, XC could become one of the go-to mixing services for BTC. Blocknet is in a Duopoly with Supernet. Within blocknet it's a creation of a oligopoly for the involoved coins. the crypto alt-coin scene has had very low barriers to entry, this is the creation of such by service of trust, reputation and features.
* B2B few coins has made the transition from a digital collectibles to real world application, this jumping the Chasm between early adopters and early mainstream is very hard and will be a very strong differentiator for XC.
Dan is clearly not openly sharing his directions or visions as this market still is way to competitive with very low barriers to entry. I think this is wise, same goes for the opensource code, it will surely come when the market position is established. But it is also very clear by now that he has a long term plan with this, there are clear patterns in the products he releases and how they inter-service each other.
It's a shame that investor relations are best managed on BTCtalk because this place user-base is rotten to the core. Hopefully we will get some peace when the next btc spike comes in a couple of weeks.
+1 consensus on most of your points.. great summary of the current situation.