In today’s world, it’s all about marketing and branding. Good marketing can make a bad product sell well and vice versa. That is also the case in the cryptocurrency world. Because of this, there is a lot of space for manipulating currencies.
Paper currencies and cryptocurrencies only have value because people think they have value. Some currencies are backed by gold or other precious metals; others are backed by nothing but hot air. The latter does have value because people think they have value and thus use them as a unit of exchange. That is where public perception comes into play.
The public perception of a cryptocurrency has a big influence on the value of the currency. For any well-known cryptocurrency, a crucial factor can be people’s positive reactions to the innovations of the currency. Positive reactions are had by some with respect to the fact that cryptocurrencies are a thorn in the side of the banking sector and provide the banking sector with competition. There are also often negative reactions to cryptocurrencies and associations with scams.
Bitcoin is the most popular crypto so logically it would be the most manipulated. It should be noted that for cryptocurrencies that are reliable not all news is a branding or marketing manipulation. On the other hand, the few cryptocurrencies that are made just so scammers could work with them are typically heavily manipulated marketing and branding-wise.
Essentially, the main idea is that cryptocurrencies should be open sourced, but that’s not the case. Every cryptocurrency that’s a scam does not reveal its codebase or simply doesn’t have one. A big reason why they’re closed source could also be due to the fact that there is no codebase at all. One can check out the code for any cryptocurrency at Github. The Whitepaper is also a way to determine if the company has a clear strategy and idea, or if they are simply waffling on about nothing concrete.
So, to conclude, every cryptocurrency is being manipulated in some way. Some cryptocurrencies are made just for the purpose of manipulating the public, and others are not. One should keep in mind that rise of an unknown cryptocurrency is probably influenced by manipulation.