From what I can gather, this giant whale is in fact a tool of the developers for helping moderate the SBD exchange rate. Naturally some of its funds have to be powered down, in order for it to fund the system, pay the website bills, pay for programmers and architects and whatnot.
It may not always be the biggest whale. In fact, this power down it is doing, will drop its' controlling share, and other big investors naturally will then have more say in how to do things. I think that this is working exactly how the mining rewards distribution in Dash works. The central business of Steem rightly should be Steem itself. @steemit is the account being used to this end.
Besides all this, by selling steem this way, and the price going down, I mean, it has to hit a bottom point at some level, and at that point, Steem becomes a more attractive investment for further injection of funds from big investors. And the strategies I outline in my article above also point towards exactly how one goes about doing this. I am quite sure that at least part of what I have said in the article will be borne out by how things progress from here on.
Steem is a corporation, public and transparent. Every holder of SP is a shareholder, and has by this the ability to have some influence in a small area of the activity of the whole Horde, and with the funds, both holding, vesting and selling, the backbone of smaller, subunits, that I am terming 'departments' various kinds of businesses, that will hold some, vest some, and sell some as they go about operations.
It's a whole new model for how to business, something a bit like an investors club or a startup club. I believe that eventually it will become a model for all businesses to run with. This is also why I think that once the powerdown is on the slow-down, a lot more money will come into the pool, and the structure of the forum system will enable marketing of the businesses run by the Departments.
It's also why I am developing what will eventually be a way to properly organise the membership of these departments, and indeed even the names will become tradeable items, if a nameholder decides they want to quit running it, they can negotiate a price to transfer it to another owner, who will then administer the group membership, and the activities that the groups do. This will function as a kind of personnel management system.