Institutional investors have so many purchase options that they do not need to use backdoors.
This seems to me one of the many fake news that would claim to influence the market
They're the best options available. Why would anyone with deep pockets go to an exchange and wreak havoc with the order book? Not only would your pricing go haywire, you'd get preyed upon by all the little shits lurking.
OTC is by far the most sensible route for many.
They won't even want to do that now until they have been able to accumulate enough. They are not dumb actually and just like you mentioned, they know the impact buying from an exchange would create and apparently, the best way to do all that without being spotted is via the backdoor channel, while they possibly keep suppressing the price on exchange from moving haywire (borrowing your word) until they sure have been able to accumulate as much as possible. At the end, the dumb ones will end up losing out because one way or the other, the buying spree on exchanges will start.
Institutional investors have so many purchase options that they do not need to use backdoors.
This seems to me one of the many fake news that would claim to influence the market
I am wondering which other option you think they would have than going the OTC way. We are talking about institutions here, buying large volume of digital coins and of course, you cannot expect them to simply just stroll into an exchange and start speeding things up regarding how speculative the price can be and rise fast to create FOMO. Institutions know when to be stashing up and would want to leave that uncertainty that way for now and keep accumulating until they feel they are fine with it, and if they will have to do all these via exchange, I am not sure the liquidity will be enough to not get the price pumped unnecessarily.