Most bitcoin prices are tied to an average or a collection of what the top exchanges publish as the current bitcoin price. But who's actually moving their prices? From my understanding, retail users don't have the power to move prices in the short term. Whales supposedly are the ones who can make the price suddenly jump or drop...but they trade on OTC desks right? not on retail exchanges....so how are these Whale movements being reflected on retail exchanges to determine what the current bitcoin price is? Or are there actually some whales who use the exchanges to trade on?
Demand dude.. it's always has been the demand. Even the high companies that adopts and uses Bitcoin wouldn't give such pump impact if the demand would be lesser. Trading tends to depends on how much the liquidity is and what would be the demand. Once they are both huge, expect the market either going sideways or up above. Hence, it's not really "who" that moves the price, its "who are".
Meanwhile, whales do also have a huge effect in the price, but it will be much effective when it would be combined with proper marketing and social media articles to hype up the people, making the demand go more and more.
It's not really a need. As far as I know crowds are people who have a lot of money, but are very passive. Because they're all alone hunting and that won't make a big wave.
I think that the institutions that manipulate the crypto market are the main reason. KOLs, also known as whales, always post on their social media sites to shill or fud about Bitcoin according to their strategy. That makes the crowd skeptical about the price of Bitcoin, then whales just use an amount of about 1000-2000 BTC is enough for the crowd to sell off.
So Bitcoin sell-offs or pumps are all related to the psychological manipulation scheme of the crowd, not according to demand.