Its possible its the LINK team/Chainlink Labs themselves. I'm actually more inclined to think its actually just JUMP Trading now because their subsidiaries/investments are in direct competition. Since they have an inferior product their only option is too attack in a multitude of ways.
They have been doing so publicly about product usage/partnership comparisons. Sure would be easy to affect price with HFT. Those who have the liquidity control the price.
They must be desperate. It would make a lot of sense considering every time there is positive LINK news any momentum is flattened. You wouldn't even have to drop the price much to continuously stop momentum whenever bullish news is released. It would be easy to automate as well. Lmao
I've seen BTC nuke in the short term almost 2 dozen times now correlating to beneficial LINK news, usually within seconds.
Then of course you can use that as a narrative to deter future speculators with paid FUD. Short and Distort has been around since the start of the markets.
So you:
Publicly attack your competition via cherry picked comparisons
Halt momentum via price attacks when they release good news
Then you privately/anonymously pay for FUD campaigns where their retail investors largely congregate using the price manipulation you engineered as the main topic point
After all that they will still fail too.