IMHO, latest rally has several fundamental reasons behind it and is NOT a pump and dump.Reasons:1. RL has stopped Over The Counter sales of XRP's to private parties to fund itself (source: one of Gateway operators intimated this in xrptalk.com). This means that the last persistent seller of XRPs in the Ripple exchange itself is gone. This also means that those private parties, such as market makers, gateways, big private whales, etc are now told to buy in the open market. RL now has both enough money in the bank to fund itself for 5+ years AND it still has a real-soon-to-be-announced deal with a consortium of VC's for Series A investment which will make it unnecessary to sell for a long long time to come.2. Additional XRP demand from friends-and-family of recent bankers who got or are getting on board3. XRP valuation AS A STORE OF VALUE (not just as a speculative BTS-like DAC asset) has increased recently with increased volume ... it's a virtuous cycle ... several new exchanges began trading it4. BTC.SnapSwap/XRP has been the most liquid pair inside Ripple. One of the reasons for that is that btc2ripple.com functions as both an incoming AND outgoing BTC bridge into and out of Ripple. This means that it's possible to fund your Ripple account by simply sending BTC into an allocated BTC address and after 4 confirmations, you're ready to buy XRP inside the Ripple excchange.Conversely, if you wish to sell XRP you simply "send yourself some BTC to some external address" and after selling XRP at best possible rates you observe a BTC transaction in 10 minutes arriving at your BTC address ... if you wish to observe XRP -> BTC cashouts in progress observe activity on this hot wallet address https://blockchain.info/address/1Q5NPoEk2ynLvCypcH5EmxSBdLs1KrYtbK 5. Trading within Ripple of ANY asset against ANY asset has no fees ... so liquidity begets liquidity. Turns out that the most liquid exchange for KRW vs. BTC or JPY vs BTC is probably already within Ripple ... This means that Ripple functions a little like a liquidity black hole sucking liquidity from other less efficient exchanges and attracting people by both no fees and variety of assets on offer.Notice the variety of assets and how liquid they are in the pie chart here https://www.ripplecharts.com/ 6. Quote from the recent RL brochure / page: which USED to be here https://ripple.com/integrate/executive-summary-for-financial-institutions/ (presented here to show how much is "cooking" behind the scenes which outsiders don't have visibility into but friends-and-family of participants do)Ripple Labs is working with:Top-20 global, EU, and US banksConsortiums of EU and US banksMultibillion-dollar hedge funds and quantitative trading firmsTop-10 global remittance operatorsTop-15 global telecoms (mobile money)I hope this helps ...P.S. I would rather comment on technical or economic aspects of the Ripple network instead of speculating about the recent price increase.