By whales you mean the fraud team behind some ICO projects right?

I do agree that ICOs this year are not that successful compared to last year and imo that is because there is more fake projects compared to the last years. People now realize that they can get people to invest in them by hosting ICOs and giving false promises. That is why you can see almost new thread of ICO is popping up in the altcoin section.

There are still good ICOs tho. If you will take time to search. Some actually have potential.