I have a couple of questions about the recent price rise.
I noticed that yesterday (April 2) the price rose in a 24 hour period from 18 to 308 satoshis.
I am wondering why? There was heavy volume on Poloniex of around 200 BTC whereas usually PIGGY is under 0.5 BTC. So it's not as if the rise was due to one or two orders of a couple of BTC which you often see with alt-coins. There was genuine community interest.
At 00:00 GMT on the 2nd, the price rose from 18 to 308 in a matter of minutes before falling to around 130 and hovering around this level for about six hours before falling. Even now at 19:00 GMT on the 3rd, the price is still around 40 satoshi.
My second question is whether this rise was predictable? In other words, was it based on something "real" (new news) or just some irrational market sentiment based on FUD and FOMO?
FWIW, I have looked at PIGGY before and think it's a great idea. I didn't buy because of the very low volumes and thus poor liquidity although, quite obviously, I now wish I had.
Thanks for any suggestions / speculations / ideas about why the price rose and whether it was predictable.
I wish I had something solid to offer, but since I raised the same question above I've found nothing despite repeated google searches and checks of the few Piggycoin message threads, websites, etc. out there. If the dev team here knows anything they are keeping mum for now.
The only thing I have to report is that on the Poloniex trollbox there were some statements about a game or games that someone had apparently seen, that would pay out in piggycoin. One comment specified it was an "Angry Birds" type game. A popular game faucet that brought in advertising revenue for the game owner could create a sustained stream of Piggycoin purchases by the game operator in order to fund the payouts to players. For a coin with a very small market cap like Piggycoin, the promise of even one such popular game could cause a major price spike. It would be a logical move, too, because someone with the ability to create such a game could quietly buy up a lot of PIGGY ahead of time and then benefit handsomely when the price rose in the general excitement of the announcement/release of the game. Think "Big fish in a small pond." By contrast someone creating a game faucet for Bitcoin is not going to cause any price impact at all. So there is incentive for them to focus on supporting an alt like Piggycoin.
But my failure to find any corroboration for the trollbox comments means I think there is a strong likelihood that this was an April Fools joke that got out of hand, or is otherwise a false rumor that let to the speculative price spike. In which case we can expect to see the price gravitate back to where it was previously. I'd like to think otherwise, but I'll just have to wait and see...