This is the thing for me. All markets (whether that be stock or crypto) are manipulated somewhat. In the stock market its all around charting. Someone somewhere, created a whole playbook around charting, whereby a "stock market pattern" can be created (with many of the patterns able to be read in 2 ways, either for growth or decline - a lot of grey, sort of the AFL's playbook), the big boys take their position earlier, but the amount of short term traders will then take their position. Its essentially a self fulfilling prophecy for the big boys and 1 of the major reasons why many traders don't make money. There will be enough people that make money with the movement, that they continue to trade, and will tell others about this great method to make money from the stock market.
Crypto - and it was seen with devastatingly big impacts a few weeks - is under the control of only a few people. From those that can "create" additional bitcoins or whatever, only a small number essentially control the supply, and then when they choose to can push the markets up and down at will, even when they lose control of a coin, they can devastate the value.
For the above reasons, its why I'm a see company buy company type of guy. I don't short, I don't sweat the market. I just take positions in companies that I think are undervalued. Its doing well for me now, and time has shown for me that the above reasons show that small cap investing is very hit and miss. I fell into this trap in the first few years of trading and lost a fair amount of money, but a focus on undervalued mid caps is the sweet spot for me, coupled with larger holdings in bigger cap stocks that are safer but have strong dividend yields.
Different coins, different holders.
Bitcoin, the original, is limited to 21 million coins. There can't be more than that. Then add in how many wallets are sitting around with BTC that the owners can no longer access because they've forgotten/lost the keys/died and the general consensus there is only 18 million BTC available. Somewhere recently they calculated that the top 80 holders of BTC own about 15% of the supply. They can absolutely manipulate the market if they so choose but they need to be a bit more careful as crypto is now regulated to the extent regulators will treat deliberate manipulation of BTC as it would any investment.
Crypto currency may well be the future, but I expect it to be well controlled by governments with sovereign coins. Plenty of money to be made in crypto, but plenty more to be lost.
NFT on the other hand I just can't see the future use case. Stay away.