My guess is this is the result of someone(or many) realizing for not that much they can own a significant portion of this coin and be in a very nice position if it really takes off.
Is it going to with the devs awol? There's a missed opportunity, here.
Worst case scenario the dev's code is simply forked on github and bitcoin's code is merged back in. Its open source so there are options if they are gone. Fortunately its very similar to bitcoin so adopting bitcoin's developments would not be hard to merge in (code wise). Unless I am missing something about the authority requirement to push updates?