Weird thought maybe, but could the sudden increase in hashrate be the pandacoin crowd testing the settings?
(Everything about that coin feels wrong BTW... Hope for their miners' sake that I'm wrong.)
That sounds about right.
Pandacoin is saying they will use the vertminer so a lot of miners will be setting that up and then switching to Pandacoin pools when they go live.
We will know for sure if the hashrate drops a lot when Pandacoin launches.