At three o'clock in the morning, ETH suddenly plunged towards the $2800 mark, and my phone didn't stop buzzing. However, I have never felt nervous at such moments; instead, I feel a bit excited. Those old institutions are once again playing the familiar script.

Looking at that striking large bearish candlestick on the K-line chart, I pondered the logic behind it. The signal for the Bank of Japan to raise interest rates had actually been released long ago, and institutions began to position themselves a week in advance. The script was clearly written – they were just waiting for retail investors to obediently fall into the trap.

At nine in the morning, that plunge directly triggered over 420,000 liquidations, and sell orders on the exchange surged like a waterfall. But the really interesting part is in the on-chain data: the top ten Ethereum whales didn't move at all; instead, they swallowed nearly 80,000 ETH around the 2780 mark. This isn't called panic; this is called buying the dip.

**Market manipulation is actually just a few tricks**

The tactics in the cryptocurrency market never go out of style; they just keep changing their disguise. The "price suppression and accumulation" method used by the whales is as smooth as breathing—deliberately driving down the price to trigger the stop-loss orders of retail investors, and then turning around to buy up the panic sell orders at the bottom price. This trick works especially well on coins with low liquidity and small trading volumes.

There is also the blatant "pump and dump" strategy, where the order book is filled with seemingly large buy orders to attract trend-following traders to jump in, only for these buy orders to be removed one by one, and then they start to sell off. Such practices are almost commonplace in the cryptocurrency market.

Recalling the classic cases from the market wave in 2021, some people made a fortune in a short period through deliberate order manipulation. Technical tools and the loopholes in market microstructure are always the hunting grounds for those with large capital.