I am certain there is some Left Hand>Right Hand transactions going on in the XPY markets , but the pattern says it is only a relatively small amount.Primarily to get Pumps going, and the faithful pile on afterwards. And, this is important, 90% of the trading is happening on Cryptsy, which does have fees. Also, there are way too many people following these pump and dump cycles cashing in on the wave (myself included) for it to be a major amount of fake transactions to create perception of volume. The amount he would lose to all of the day traders following this is massive compared to the fee issue. The reality is that people really are buying into XPY still. Hard to fathom, I know, but it is the case.
Indeed, from what I know of one or two big holders, they're big traders. They wouldn't ever say as much but I'm sure theyy've been trading their backsides off to derisk and minimise losses to date.
Point being, as there are a number of people "playing the market" the competition to suck out BTC from any rises is fierce. If things have to be paid for and there's little money to do this, then gaming the market becomes even more critical. Strangling those traders while trying to hoover up any cash you can seems to be the name of the game.
Looking at volumes recently, all these players are using each each others money to give impressions of activity when in fact it's a progressively slide maintained by various vapours and "rays of light". The sharper one's use these times to trade a profit, and as I suspect they're far better than certain players we could mention.
