I recently read through a post by a user on "Why Bitcoin Futures aren't a conspiracy against Bitcoin" on reddit. It elaborated 3 reasons in detail as to why the current futures market is relatively new and isn't really affecting Bitcoins price (considering many people assume it's the cause of the downward trend in crypto prices this week and the previous). In short the first reason that the user mentioned was about a lack of volume in terms of open contracts on CME and CBOE on the day we noticed the value of Bitcoin plummet. The second reason being the maintenance margin requirements being too high which would discourage manipulation, basically for CME being 43% and CBOE being 40%, and then there's brokerage costs thus reguding leverage as compared to directly investing in Bitcoins. Lastly, the user also described that there were actually higher long positions as compared to short positions by wall street investors and this too were a small proportion of investors.

The post was a very interesting read and kind of changed my perspective on the amount of volume that would be required to invest inorder to really manipulate the prices of Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin futures are still in its infancy stage to really cause any such sort of price downfalls or increases rapily.

Reference to the post I was talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7td20u/why_bitcoin_futures_arent_a_conspiracy_against/