Crypto Market Prices are heavily beholden to the goodwill and ethics of exchanges, which basically means some significant amount of it is indirectly affected by supply and trade manipulation

We know that Cefi accounts for the majority of crypto trade volume. Take for instance Bitcoin. By current estimates, Cefi accounts for around 83% of Bitcoin trade spot volume, Defi obviously accounting for the rest. This means that crypto prices are heavily affected by many of the decisions Cefi platforms make.

What I mean is, if a exchange is offering say 11 million tokens on the market available to buy or sell. But if there are only in fact 10 million actual tokens in reserve, they have effectively increase the supply by 10% which would (probably) have the effect of reducing the price. Now why would an exchange do this? It's for obvious reasons, and the age-old one: profits. If there if heavy demand for trading on a token, the more tokens there are the more trading fees the exchange can accumulate regardless of if it's buys or sells. Understanding this, with all the shady platforms we have seen over the years, exchanges have almost certainly done this and it is very likely that some still do. And if you wonder if Proof of Reserves help with this: it does not. First off all, exchanges can report any trading volume numbers they want, and even if that number isn't manipulated, it is still pretty difficult to determine the actual token reserves from the trade volume, as they represent two very different things. A solid example is Monerorun, where users tried to withdraw their Monero from exchanges but all a sudden a number of exchanges had withdrawals frozen, some for weeks in some cases.

There are also issues of exchanges trading against users like FTX did, and others certainly are doing. With the kind of resources that and information that the exchange has, exchanges trading against users also means they can coerce the price upward or downward. Now they may not necessarily mean to manipulate the price, as they are only looking for short-term profits, but then end effect is a price that is not produced by a fair market.

There are also simpler seemingly minor things like raising withdrawal fees on particular tokens to discourage removal of those tokens from exchanges. Users may then seek to buy certain other tokens just to be able to withdraw without paying unreasonable fees. This would also have the effect of reducing the price of the sold token and increase that of the cheaper token. On this particular case, it is my view that it is the cheap fees of TRX are the sole reason it is as 'popular' or at least as relevant as it is today.

I could go on but I imagine you see the point by now. Market prices have an dependent, and probably unhealthy relationship with centralized exchanges.