Let me explain this for once. I am drunk after a great night out so let me be condescending about it.
The fact is, theire is a bunch of people out there that exchange bitcoins on-chain no matter what the USD price of a bitcoin is. They make the estimated USD transaction volume.
Now, you can speculate about their motives. They clearly don't care as much as this forum does about volatility. Be it the drugs markets, be it remittances, we don't know fur sure. We don't care either. What we care about is that the on-chain transaction volume is growing steadily.
That means that the price of a bitcoin, sooner or later, will have to catch up with that information, because bitcoins are a finite resource with predictable supply, and because money velocity.

Ignore this post at your own risk.