Putting that much money into cold storage is quite simply the thing that should be done in any and every scenario.
The market can be manipulated by a tiny fraction of those coins.
If you think they were allocating user funds to pump the price...
Then you believe they were taking random Bitcoin/USDT from their clients to pump the market?
If April 18th is when they stopped then it means the books are balanced and they still have all that stake.
I think you really have to walk through this step by step to see if the theory is possible.
If manipulation stopped at 46 cent Hive shouldn't it be very easy to return to this level organically?
That's a 40% bounce from here.