The hashrate is about 3 times higher than it should be based on the current price and it keeps on spiking up higher and then coming back down which makes the difficulty rise quickly and then take a long time to adjust back down. This is causing really long block times and delaying the confirmation of transaction as well as slowing down the mining pools and making it much less profitable to mine.

While the algorithm for calculating difficulty could be changed to alleviate this problem, that might not be necessary If we can grow the coin to a higher price, network hashrate and market share of the CryptoNote mining capacity. If the network hashrate is higher, then it becomes more costly to use these hashrate spikes to manipulate the difficulty and disrupt the block times. The larger we can grow the coin, the more robust and secure it will be.