According to dormant bitcoin chart at http://www.dormantbitcoin.com/, we can see that the last two bars are very close. Approximately 20% of the bitcoins in wallets which have sent some bitcoins between block 270000 to 28000, but did not sent anything since block 280,000. This percentage is historically high, since historically the percentage of the second last bar is around 10%, which indicates that more bitcoins are dormant in recent months. A complete picture can also be seen in http://dormantbitcoin.com/dormantbitcoin/panorama/.

Well, this observation is a little bit counter intuition of mine, since bitcoin should be more active with the growing popularity.

People are hoarding bitcoins and thinking they can be richer counting on bitcoins?

Or the dormancy is due to the recent price drop?

The bottom line is that, I personally are hoarding bitcoins. I am always buying and never selling and bet the the price will go up further.