Sure OTC services exist (I believe Coinbase has one) but I think the whales spending $10m on BTC might have an inkling about buy low and sell high – aka they are decidedly not buying during the period between August 2017 and today, which is exactly the period they would need to be buying at scale for all these startups to unload their disintegrating assets.

You are very wrong, OTC markets are very liquid right now.

Also $10 million in BTC isn't very much, you can trade this on the public markets without slipping very much if you really want to.

yes of course they are liquid now, and of course you can trade it in crypto-crypto markets, the question is if you can trade it for USD cash money in a real bank account, eight months ago

There may have been more slippage than your startup was comfortable with, but the OTC market has always been liquid enough for startups to liquidate ETH/BTC from ICOs, even in the middle of the bear market.

show us some evidence!

What sort of evidence are you looking for? If indeed people were having problems cashing out as you seem to think, this would have been big news. In which case you should be able to find and provide evidence of this occurring. And, if I understand you correctly, you might as well ask for evidence that investors can sell their TSLA stock for cash.

hardly anybody was even trying to cash out! As demonstrated by this headline.

That's not how OTC markets work.

Have you tried to buy or sell a big amount and did you not get a price you were looking for? Or have you ever read anyone that had this problem? I don't know anyone that has ever complained about this..

Very much so, I'm not sure why you think you couldn't. 10 million really isn't that much.