I would say this is the case too... if you look at the graph, there are obvious inorganic amounts of growth all of a sudden, and it goes down again all of a sudden, this cannot be a coincidence of a ton of people starting transacting, maintaining this quota of transactions and then in sync all of them stop transacting.. that's just nonsense, so in my opinion it is obvious spam by the usual suspects (Roger Ver and Bitmain).

And of course, segwit transactions are starting to go up, which is also helping the network.