If there is a large / few large players at work, and their goal is to have as large a proportion of nodes for as long as possible to capture the max proportion of emissions, they would likely dedicate a portion of earnings to suppressing the price by selling some into this low-liquidity market in order to reduce the incentive for others to scale up operations and compete.
I have no idea who it is and their motivations, but if I were to try rinsing emissions just now with a long-term bullish perspective on the token, Iād certainly consider using price suppression to reduce competition as a strategy.
Anyway, itās not that crazy yet; Iām still profitable with a few Hetzner auction serversā¦ and thatās with current ANT prices. Anyone with a medium term view will be considering selling most ANT at multiples of that, so I expect to see node numbers growing a fair bit more in the coming days / weeks, unless something changes with resources required to run nodes.
I definitely wouldnāt start pointing to bad actors while itās still profitable and easy to spin up more nodes.