I think the futures have played a significant part in allowing the big fish to manipulate the cryptocurrency market.
The stockmarket is bound by laws where cryptocurrency is not. In fact governments generally hate cryptocurrency since it puts their spending ability at risk. Governments will happily look the other way when cryptocurrency is being played. The dirty tricks that these big fish would never get away with in the stockmarket are being exploited heavily in the cryptocurrency world. Cryptocurrency futures were just a tool that they used to exploit cryptocurrency. Was that the intent when futures were dreamed up? I can't help but think someone had to have thought about it.
Cryptocurrency fans wanted no centralized government control. Well, we got that, but the reality is that we have to take the bad with the good.