December bitcoin price spike caused by airdrops?

Concerning the spike in bitcoin price in December 2017, if you have a look at the schedule of airdrops that took place:

• 2017/NOV: [2] BTC, BCD
• 2017/DEC: [14] LBTC, SBTC, B2X, BCX, BTX, BTW, BTF, BTN, FBTC, BTP, QBTC, ABTC, BTH, BTT
• 2018/JAN: [2] UBTC, BTV

Source: btcdiv.com

You can see that lots of new coins [14] were distributed in December to existing bitcoin addresses. It was also clear that the bitcoin exchanges would not pay them out to their users. There would certainly be no repeat of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) payout of August 2017.

Therefore, there is a possibility that a good number of market makers withdrew their bitcoin buffers in December from the exchanges in order to benefit from these airdrops. That may in turn have contributed to a shortage of bitcoins in the markets, leading to a spike in the price.

In fact, this should be visible from the details in the order book histories of the exchanges. It is possible to get some data, but it is unfortunately, a bit expensive (9,990 EUR):

https://www.kaiko.com/products/all-exchanges-historical-10-order-books

Still, aggregate numbers do not really matter that much. We would really need to look for a pattern of individual market makers with large bitcoin deposits in November, withdrawing them in December, and then restoring them in January. Only the exchanges themselves could verify this hypothesis.