Any objective reason for the recent price increase?
Is there a whitepaper or anything about how the POS works and what makes it different from e.g. NXT's POS?
I think there are a few reasons playing off of one another. First, as has been the case, this isn't a clone of another coin. IMHO, that does give some validity to the project. Next, trading has been very slow for a while and before that we saw a lot of bored/weak hands dump their stakes they purchased in the IPO. This means that the overwhelming amount of Qora holders are doing just that, holding or continuing to slowly buy. In other words, the market has seemed to stagnante at the bottom and we are about to see another MASSIVE wave of investment or dumping (if tradional market analysis holds true.)
Third, consider that Qora's internal Asset Exchange is about to cut on in a few days, which is a benefit. I've not verified, but from what I've heard QORA will be the only crypto with a built-in dividend payment system. I've used NXT for a long time and I own quite a few assets. Paying dividends has been a huge hassle for many of the asset managers because the payment process is 100% manual.
I think all of these factors must be taken into account. Many worthless coins have seen better marketcap than QORA recently, but Qora (the dev) has steadily worked on this project. If he continues to release features within QORA that exist elsewhere, but slowly innovates a better implementation, this coin can only remain silent for so long.
People will start to notice and it will inevitably take off.
The risk factors of investing in QORA are that the code is (not yet) open source. But, I'm always quick to point out that this thing is written in Java. If you have dev background at all, it's easy-peasy to decompile and inspect. The other risk factor (IMHO) is that since Qora is anonymous and is the sole dev, if he were to *disappear*, then the coin would slowly die as well because the community isn't yet mature enough to dig into the Java modules, extract and figure out the java code, and further manage the project.
In a nutshell, that is about as "objective" as I can be. These are my opinions but I've tries to base that off of emotionless investment and keen observation. QORA is currently a hedge for me which I hope pays off. I highly suspect it will but it might take some time to pick up steam.