It is nothing to do with whales, it is about speculators.
The Steem price is following the same pattern of other cryptocurrencies.
What usually happens is that there is some big news, the speculators pile in, but to sustain the price there needs to be a constant stream of news of developments in the coin. If there is no news the speculators bail.
Lets look at bitcoin
The first development that caused the spike in the price in 2011 was the dark nets accepting it for buying pot. It suddenly had a unique use that fiat didn't have. Money poured in, some of it people buying to purchase pot, the rest of it speculators buying in anticipation of other real users buying. Then the gambling sites started accepting bitcoin, causing a second spike in 2012/3. This is because visa and mastercard blocked users in the USA from using their cards for online gambling - so if you were american and wanted to gamble online, bitcoin was the only option. So another unique use. Then the Cyprus thing happened, and bitcoin was a way of storing money where it couldn't be confiscated - another unique use. Then mainstream retailers started to accept it in 2014, but this wasn't that much of a game changer because you can use credit and debit cards to buy stuff already, and the bitcoin price has stalled since then, because no new developments and no new uses have come forward.
Now look at Steem.
There was a spike in July once the payments started because it proved that here was a way to monetise writing, art and photography without tipping from your own wallet. So a unique concept, because steem does something you can't do either with fiat or bitcoin. But since then there has been no big news, just small developments shared only within the steemit community. Peerhub got launched, but without much publicity, and we have no stats on how many people are using it. Wallets like Bitwala started accepting steem but say that no-one is using it. Coinpayments.net have added steem and steem dollars - but we have no data about whether people are using it, and hence no news to pique the interest of the speculators.
Meanwhile the speculator community watch stats like the number of users logged into steemit in the last 24 hours to give them an idea of the size of the community. Here is a screenshot of where we stand today:
Only 3781 accounts logged in. Kinda pitiful really. The active community matters because speculators reason correctly that the bigger the community the more commercial activity will be taking place and hence the greater demand for the currency. If less than 4000 people are logged in, then how many of them will be buying stuff using coinpayments, or sending money using bitwala, or purchasing stuff on peerhub? Not many.
Of course it is a chicken and egg thing - the lower the price falls, the fewer people log in, which causes the speculators to abandon the coin some more, which causes fewer still people to log in.
What we need is some sort of news
Not news about minor technical developments or tweaks to the steemit interface, but some big "unique use" news. Perhaps a marketplace where people can sell their services. Perhaps getting on a big exchange like Kraken or Coinbase. Or perhaps news that one of our competitors (synero or yours) has failed, which should send the speculators rushing back to steem. Or even stats released by peerhub showing the amount of activity taking place there. Any type of news will do!