A regular user would keep a token on an exchange (more often on a DEX than a CEX nowadays) for speculation purposes. A whale may keep large liquidities on an exchange for different reasons:
- to assure liquidity for a coin
- to be a market maker
- to manipulate the price, especially for low-cap coins, where they can more easily do that
- Specific to Hive, some whales may not like the 13-week lockup period or they may prefer not to keep their transactions trail on the chain.
Regarding Upbit, in particular, the major issue with it is it isn't open globally. I and you cannot create accounts there. I imagine Blocktrades can't either, directly, although maybe for whales different rules may apply than the ones listed on the site (for example, they can create a Korean company to invest for them on Upbit; or use a Korean citizen proxy, if they are trustful).
Anyway, assuming it's for Koreans only (which I'm starting to doubt seriously) and even if it's also a hidden place for whales, that's kind of worrisome. For once, in the open, most of our HIVE is in the US and Europe, so 28.77% being on Upbit makes you wonder how is that distributed and if there is a hidden agenda behind it. Then, we no longer have a big Korean community on Hive and we parted ways on kind of bad terms. Most of that community remained on the old chain. Should we make any assumptions based on that or not?
That is an interesting way of looking at it. But I doubt a single person or group will invest this amount of money just to target Hive. Why would they risk their investment just to make the token collapse. I'm hoping they just see Hive as very undervalued and Koreans are accumulating for the increase.
Could be. But then they are speculators and at some point, they will sell. And the higher their HIVE holdings, the higher the selloff impact, when they take profit.