> Worth adding here that it also appears Zcash stakeholders have been internally buying/selling their own ZEC at inflated prices on Poloniex to artificially increase both volume and the market price.

I don't understand this. None of the stakeholders have even received their money yet; this is publicly verifiable.

Hypothetically, anyone could "prop-up" the crypto market for a newly launched coin by buying the first Asks from Poloniex at a deliberately inflated price and then sell back-and-forth to themselves at the same inflated price to create false volume / pricing.

You wouldn't need any ZEC to begin with.

Just to be clear, I am not specifically claiming the devs are doing this, but somebody with an interest in ZEC performing well (and money to burn to prop up the price) has been.

It's eased off now in any case, but it hasn't gained trust from a trading point of view.

The zcash dev team have stated they aren't trading ZEC [1]. You dispute that?

https://lists.randombit.net/pipermail/cryptography/2016-Nove...