It could be due to adoption but i fail to see the catalyst for more adoption. Did they make a more user friendly wallet or some break through that makes them more usable for the average person. Apple releasing an iphone with btc wallet as included software, something of that nature. Those are things that would drive adoption. That is what leads me to believe it is more due to fragility and uncertainty with markets. Nothing has changed afaik but what are the other choices? Gold, silver, other types of investment vehicles, but they all tend to revolve around the same things. Crypto is sort of it's own ecosystem, for the time being. Did they approve that etf or anything like that dealing with btc? So that would be adoption too. I guess regardless of the reason why, btc would only really grow the more people adopt it. Can't argue against adoption being the driving force.

An exchange or company could be the whale, surely. It could be an trading bot gone rogue, only limited by our imaginations as to what it could be.

Well some 'unknown to most' buyer purchased the 15k uno from the auction sale of the recovered cryptsy stolen funds. After that happened the wallet began to fill up from 15k+ uno until it topped out @ 30k+ uno before being distributed to those other huge wallets. It is the wallet labeled as the cryptsy cold wallet that has seen all this iirc. There is a wallet there with 11k+ uno (uaZAA8ct...) that at the time of this saw activity 10 days 22 hours ago, then another wallet (uhMHvHb1...) for 7k that saw movement 10 days 6 hours ago. I also believe this wallet (uXYfoocr...) is tied to the same with 8.3k uno even though the activity was 5 days 23 mins ago. I also think they are mostly working from the cryptsy wallet, i figure the courts just turned over the wallet to them instead of worrying about transferring things to a wallet of the purchasers owning. I really have no idea though. I get confused trying to trace all the transactions around but the data is all there on https://chainz.cryptoid.info/uno/#!wallets  for anyone inquisitive enough to poke around. It still won't tell us anything in the end but it can be fun to speculate.