The extreme escalation in transaction times is there to ensure the whales can cash out but that smaller investors cannot.
Whales can make large transactions, the fees do not mean as much to them.
At the same time the small investors cannot cash out because their investment is quite small compared to the fees.
The result is the following:
- Whales are cashing out, converting to fiat
- Newbies are buying from the whales in the hope of continues increases
- Existing smaller investors do not want to sell now (despite possible large profits) because of the high fees is you only have a small investment (Today another bitcoiner on this forum has to pay a 20$ fee for a 50$ transaction).
When the whales have completed the sell-off, smaller bitcoin investors can finally begin to sell and that will be the trigger for a complete collapse in the price.
There is no evidence of your theory, this is completely speculation.
Bitcoin price is just $16,200 at the moment, and bitcoin get more attention since it reaches $10,000. It makes sense to cash out at the peak instead of at current market situation. Which mean, big whales already cashed out when bitcoin reach $20,000 or they may want to wait for bitcoin reach $50,000 or even higher price as the best price to extract the profit. ALthough, it's not profitable for smaller investors to cash out when the mempool flooded with so many unconfirmed transactions, better to wait until all thing get fixed and bitcoin reach a higher point.