Trying to give some perspective on the current state of the altcoin marketplace. I feel like it's important that people read this and listen to this, and even inspect buy/sell orders to verify what I am saying. If we stand together to prevent this from happening and selling at deflated prices, the market can recover.
Whales (super rich people) are taking advantage of news events and FUD to bring the price down, making it look like it is in response to these events when in reality, and on inspection of buy/sell orders it is clear manipulation.
.Whales (super rich people) are taking advantage of altcoins that are on single marketplaces (Think PRL, DBC, ELIXIR). They are doing this through the use of Sell and Buy walls.
.A sell wall is when one of these whales dumps thousands of altcoins to be sold at a below market price. They have no intention of actually selling all their coins at this price whatsoever, what it actually means is that if anybody on that marketplace wants to sell their coins for whatever reason (FUD, happy with their profit, price going down) they will have to reduce their sell price to below that of the whale, otherwise everyone that wants to buy some of the altcoin will just buy from the whales seemingly endless supply. This brings the price down significantly, sending off a number of signals (people begin to think their coin is crashing so panic sell, people begin to buy into the FUD surrounding tiny news story's such as S.korea "banning" cryptocurrencys) leading to a downward spiral of the price getting lower and lower. At this point the whales work is done (and they can lift their sell wall if they so wish to)
.At the same time as creating these Sell Walls... the whale will also create a buy wall at a cheaper price than their already reduced sell wall. This means that all the coins that are being sold at the price needed to get past the sell wall, will be going to that same whale and they are getting a load of coins super cheap.
This cycle just continues repeatedly, allowing the rich of the crypto world to get richer, and the poorer to loose out more. It is essential that you do not fall into this trap, and sell when there are massive manipulations of the market. The fact that these sell and buy walls exist proove that the big time investers are confident in these coins, as they are buying as many as they can and that the price will go up. If you are selling your coins now at a fear of making a loss you WILL loose out. We can all stop this from happening by HODL and not falling victim to these walls.
I appreciate I may not have explained this greatly so will go through an example.
1. Price of PRL (for sake of argument) is $1
2. Whale sees random piece of news that could affect crypto market and create FUD. Uses this to artificially reduce price of PRL
3. Whale creates massive sell order of PRL at $0.9 - This brings down average price on exchange. people start to panic and believe that PRL is crashing. Perhaps due to this minor bit of news that the whale has manipulated
4. People get scared, and want to sell their coins. However the only way to sell their coins is to sell at a price cheaper than $0.9. This brings down the price further and further as more and more people get scared into selling
5. The Whale, that has no intention of giving up on PRL, buys all the coins at the deflated price (with a buy wall cheaper than the massive sell wall they've created) thus increasing their portfolio through manipulating others into panic selling. This is what is happening currently, and you need to resist it. I know it's hard when you see your coins going down, but they will go back up (unless you have complete shitcoin). Just HODL
TL/DR = Price manipulation, especially for single market coins (mainly those on Kucoin). HODL