Well, in my opinion, markets are always manipulated, especially the crypto one because is very small compared to other assets.

For example, look at what happened with a news which at the end is just a non-issue (the approval of the VanEck SolidX Bitcoin ETF has only been postponed to November 30th). This postponement brought the market to such a massive crash.

The crypto market is still so small compared to other assets (like the stock market), that if a group of whales starts to sell massively, they bring the price down pushing down the order book and then the mass will follow seeing the price going down... then they will buy cheaper bitcoins.