Maybe he's gaming the market.

The dev has a huge premine and therefore the ability to set a virtually unbeatable sell wall price.

Now let's say he has a bunch of BTC earned, bought or mined previously.

So he sets it low forcing anyone who wants to exit to go even lower and then he buys up everything
below the sell wall and removes it and shifts to creating a buy wall.

He sets a buy wall now somewhat a few percent higher than the previous sell wall, meaning anyone wanting
to buy in has to now pay more than his buy wall price.

He sells the coins he just bought to the new buyers for a percent profit in BTC.

Rinse and repeat building a large stash of both the coin and BTC up.

I've used this tactic successfully a bunch of times (on a small scale) in the DMD market. If I want more DMD, I place
a sell order for some of my stash 1 satoshi more than I want to pay. Someone outbids me and I buy them. When I have
enough DMD, I switch to selling by creating buy offers 1 satoshi less than I want to sell for. People outbid me to buy and
I then sell to them.

This actually works especially if you have enough coin and BTC to make walls which the other traders cannot break.