Listen to 'Allyouracid'. He knows what he's talking about.
Allyouracid-It could be day trader/bot buying and selling it's own, creating volume, and some small players buy in, in between. Remember the 177 buy/sell coins? Look at the book, only takes a couple of thousand. If these guys release a solid working form of anything by deadline, the book is set up to explode. I've seen this before, it's a good sign.
A bot was my thought, too. Since weeks, almost months i watch this behavior, and I'm constantly comparing charts, trade times and source code of more or less known trading bots and engines, being constantly sleep deprived and doing my own analysis and coding, trying to figure out the weak points of that system. I think, I'm getting closer. Or I might just be hallucinating. ^^
please tell us more, how does it work? and what is the purpose of these bots.?
Well, the obvious and short answer would be: making money.
If you take a look at the 2 recent spikes on cryptsy (1d chart), you'll notice that their way of progression is very similar. And cryptsy's chart is full of such spikes. They don't look that much same-ish like the last two, but the pattern is always roughly the same.
I wouldn't bet my ass for this being a bot, because I could not clearly relate the price in-/decreases to a certain time (most bots are coded as sloppy as fuck and if you read and understand the code, it's [or it was... got a bit better] easy to determine their timeframe of action, meaning building and analyzing indicators, so you can do the same [e.g. with EMA 9/20 when the bot uses EMA 10/21, so you're a bit earlier to detect the signals] and e.g. buy before they finished and then sell on their sorry asses like every hour or so).
I don't know if the volume of CLOAK is really that much manipulated, because if it was, that would mean that one (or a couple of) person(s) patched the orderbook with his/their own orders all the way along, making small buys from himself and others while removing parts of his sell orders and thus pushing the price up with little money.
When the price has reached a good value, other buyers (don't know yet if it's the usual "buy high, sell low" type of guys or another manipulation; perhaps a mix of both) step in (you can clearly see this if you watch the usual price increases... I'm working in home office, so i can always have a short look on my charts screen) and when there are enough of them, the selloff begins. Last two spikes on cryptsy was where I watched this yesterday, for example.
Currently, I'm accumulating historical trade data from cryptsy. I'm writing a tool which should provide all the tools I'm missing on the existing ones, meaning not only showing data from past trades/volume etc, but also analyzing it, so the correlations between volume, timeframes and price fluctuations become directly visible using charts, graphs and tables.
Sadly this takes a lot of time to finish (finally using good programming techniques like OOP and MVC, separate Backend and Frontend), so I'm collecting the data I need, spend time in coding when I can and hopefully someday, it will turn out useful and help to see things how they are. Because I'm quite certain that exchanges intentionally only provide a minimal set of features, whereas it is VERY easy to provide way more information and analysis if you already have a JavaScript charting library integrated.
.edit:
I think it can be watched on cryptsy right now.