The money invested can simply escape and take refuge in other assets as "smart" money, as it is usually called, usually does, the whales that so many talk about are surely the same as those of the traditional financial market. We are lucky that in the blockchain you can almost always know who the Bitcoins belong to, and it is known that the US has 144,000 bitcoins, supposedly grayscale has 500000 bitcoins, a lot of chanpeng zhao, Mychael Saylor has over 100k bitcoins , Nayib Bukele, probably the Chinese government, on the other hand, Satoshi's bitcoins Nakamoto, so if we talk about whales, most of them are known, I don't think they will abandon the ship, but anything can happen, especially when the actors are large institutions like in the traditional market, and let's remember what happens to the traditional market in all recessions, which is going to hell.