A good ol fashion pump and dump. A lot of people get into a Telegram chat or Discord chat, they get thousands of noobies in there and tell them all to buy a coin. It is a huge gamble because most people will lose on it, but others will get huge returns. Whoever buys in first and sells while price is sitll going up makes a killing, but the other people are left holding a coin that has no bvolume normally and they lose a huge %.
One my buddies goes into those Discord chatrooms and there is thousands of people there. The mods of it ban anyone who cries about losing money. They advertise for it to draw in noobs from facebook/twitter. The mods themselves already know what the coin is in advance, so they buy it up a day beforehand, then they put in sell orders for like 5x ot 20x what they bought in for. Then they tell the noobs to buy it, everyone goes into frenzy mode and drive up the price.
The one my buddy is in does this everyday on a different coin at 5PM EST. We both know it is a huge gamble and we don't actually buy the coins, we just watch and observe what they do.
I am thinking that is exactly what this is for this spike.