I’ve been thinking about this very question for sometime now, most especially after I came across a thread(can’t specifically remember which board I saw the thread, but I tried searching an didn’t find it) where the op talked about how some big whales use some sort of techniques to create barriers for bitcoin price allowing them to accumulate more until the price of bitcoin reaches their desired price, then they allow it move freely again, just with the case of it moving smoothly from 90k+ to 100k+.
This kind of strategy is possible, if one party holds a tremendous amount of BTC or a huge capital, they can influence the market. From my years of experience watching the Bitcoin market, I also heard news about people or groups of people that have huge funding and Bitcoin holdings creating barriers on both sell and buy orders. This is more rampant in the earlier days of Bitcoin and on the altcoins that have low volume.
People will do whatever they can to manipulate the market to yield them profit.
I do not think that people have to have the tremendous amount of funds before they can manipulate the market, I called it manipulation because such kinds of variations created by the individuals do not last long but falls backs. Let's take the Donald Trump's announcement of the US bitcoin reserve and how it almost immediately bullish the market when he became the president of America, as the effects would have already been predicted by those with huge capitals and investments, inside.