If the price stays relatively stable for long enough (a week? a month? three months?), then some of them will assume the price is not in fact going to go down, and will buy back in, driving the price higher. A higher price could lead to panic buying, as people who really want to be invested in Dash seek to buy back in before the cost of doing so rises even further.
Nice theory. Even nicer if it's right. It could well be.
As for me, I'm quite sure the price won't stay at the current level even for 1 month. Either the pump will continue or it will begin a long journey to the previous levels of 0.005-6 in case the manipulator has completely left the market.
I wonder if this isn't a pump, but a revaluation? We now know that over the last year, the Cryptsy hacker has dumped 7% of the entire supply of Dash (450,000 coins). This one person was artificially manipulating the market by dumping coins he should not have had (that presumably would have been in "stronger" hands).
Now that he's tapped out and is no longer suppressing the market by selling coins at any cost, price should rise. Assuming stable demand, a smaller available supply should result in higher prices. Yes, we've gone through a rapid price increase in the last two months, but maybe it's less of a pump and more of a situation where the market is adjusting to this new equilibrium.
Just a theory and I could be completely off base. It does stand to reason that the price should appreciate some, in any event, now that the manipulator is out of the market.
I personally don't believe in any sort of "healthy" or "natural" growth in crypto and think that every big upward movement was orchestrated by someone who wants to make money from panic buyers and eventually dump on them. The only "healthy" thing any crypto market can have is a slow stagnation when no manipulation is taking place.
I also feel quite skeptical regarding those stolen coins. If you compare the Dash market to most other altcoins at that period you'll see that most of them were being slowly dumped. Some even more than Dash. My theory to this is that big holders somehow anticipated the upcoming Bitcoin pump and wanted to sell it for fiat at the right time. So these stolen coins are either a convenient excuse for someone or they didn't play much role in this in the end.
Of course, these are all just my assumptions based on market observations and I can be wrong.
We only know four things for sure:
a) 450,000 Dash were stolen from Cryptsy
b) All those 450,000 Dash were sold over the last year
c) All those Dash are now gone; the dumper has exhausted his coins
d) 450,000 coins dumped on the market over the course of a year would have a significant impact on the price
Beyond that, who knows what market manipulation may exist behind the scenes. Still, there are now tens of thousands fewer coins per month being dumped on the market. That is going to have some effect. Maybe not $2.25 (November 2015) to $4.20 (January 27, 2016), but definitely *some* effect.