Institutions have already been adopting bitcoin and even though they would not come out to start telling everyone we are in, but definitely I am so certain that institutions are here already.
Yes, we may not have seen them in a huge magnitude yet, as that would take some regulations to see that happen, but from what we have been seeing lately with a whole lot of them coming up with some products and showing their peak interest, they know the benefit that lies and they are so ready to tap hugely from it.
They just can't afford showing their hand yet. The strategy is clear: accumulate, and use your fiat machines and other non asset backed trickery like future contracts in order to push the price down and dominate the market.
They know this can't last forever, so they are going to keep holding and accumulating OTC, not even selling since with futures they don't need to touch any private keys. Probably they are hiring the best in the field to keep the cold storage safe.
Hand will be shown when 100% of casuals have 0 BTC.
and when that time when 100% casuals have no btc, they will start blaming everyone for their predicament. This is what they simply what, which is to dominate the market like you said by accumulating as much as they can while taking advantage of the greedy weak hands. People need to understand that institutions know the value of this space more than anything and even though they may be silent now, it would just do a lot of people like film trick, when they tend to see they are already left out and by then, this is when we will have laggards coming in.