I see this concept of NFT was trading posited all over the place, but it should be easy to prove, yet no one has been able to produce tangible evidence, besides the occasional single flashloan based sale... which eats a tone in gas. Sure there are probably some wash trades here and there, but why is it so hard for most folks to believe that this is in fact a huge market driven by speculation?
Only the really obvious wash trades get spotted - e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-29/here-s-a-... , because half-decent manipulators will have the sense to trade between different wallet addresses and obfuscate their money sources.
Yes you are citing the flashloan wash trade that I mentioned, but the rest I don't really buy at all. You can't just materialize a wallet out of nowhere and use it in a wash trade. Wallets need at least some ETH in order to transact, because you have to pay gas to transact on ethereum. This means that even the best pseudonymous wash traders should be discoverable with chain analysis, or lead to dead ends like tornado.cash. The reality is that you can't find any good examples of this, and that means it's all hypothetical conjecture. It should be quite easy to prove otherwise.
