I've been trying to find good financial analysis of the recent price spike, but Dash news is pretty much nowhere to be found on the internet besides this small forum. The one thread on bitcointalk is just children screaming "pump and dump" and "scam".
I'll just do some back of the envelope numbers here since I can't think of anywhere else to do it. Hopefully there are others here who'd like to engage in this type of discussion.
Number of masternodes as of 3/2/17 = 3,964
Total Dash tied up (DTU) = 3,964,000 (1,000 per MN)
Total outstanding Dash (ToD) = 7,134,010
Dash Float (DF) [float: number of shares actually available for trading] = ToD - DTU = 3,170,010
This is float is notably minuscule, especially considering the below:
Over the last 2 days, trading volume progressed roughly linearly from $10,000,000 to $64,000,000. The previous normal volume ranged between $2-5MM. 68% of the most recent volume, or $44MM was BTC to DASH on Poloniex. That's a huge number of very specific conversions on an isolated exchange. In fact, of the $97MM that has moved through Poloniex over the past 24 hours, nearly HALF was BTC to DASH. No other exchange/asset pairing contributed more than 9% to the recent volume in Dash.
So this has largely been a BTC move into Dash over a very short period of time. The market cap went from $200MM 3 days ago to $400MM+ intraday today. That's a gigantic movement of capital, made even more impressive by virtue of the difficulty of quickly converting fiat into crytpo.
Assuming a $35/Dash average cost over the past 3 days, 5.7 million Dash (coins?) had to be traded (of the 3.17 million float) to account for this move. That is MASSIVE turnover. Hopefully this sparks some interesting discussion.
My speculation - A big player in the Bitcoin sphere decided to jump into Dash. The tiny float wasn't able to absorb such a large, quick move, resulting in a classic price run that we've grown accustomed to seeing in bubble economics. The float market cap was $100MM 3 days ago, and went to $300MM in 72 hours.