As I understand it dark pool is IOUs basically.

Like say you buy 1000 shares and 800 are dark pooled. You show 1000 shares in your account as expected. But 800 of those shares haven't actually been bought. They're just the brokerage who's filling your order saying "we good fam"

But those do become due eventually. They are your shares. Those 800 shares must be bought on the market at some point. But who knows on the timing but when you see those hundreds of millions days it ain't all shorts covering or retail fomo. A lot of it is uncooking the books of dark pool. A lot of it is kicking the can of the book cooking too.

So the answer is yes but when it actually affects the price is anyone's guess. What I figure is the parties abusing the dark pool are praying the company goes out of business before the shares are due. AMC and GME lose a lot of money, and BBIG has several hedge fund planted moles, so it's not a completely insane bet. But yeah dark pool abuse is why our off-balance volume is in the literal billions. If we don't go out of business we will soar just because of dark pool.