I commented this on another site, but I believe that the Verge hacks have something to do with the spikes in profitability of L2r2 in Nicehash. My theory is that to make the 51% attack or whatever they pulled off to work, they used Nicehash to buy enough hashing power to get the 51%. Buy overpaying for Lyra2rev2 hashing power on Nicehash, and buying up all the power with a premium bid, every miner that was on Nicehash at the time turned to L2r2 to satisfy the extreme hashpower demand. This worked because not only did L2r2 become instantly the most profitable algo for everybody to mine, but that every miner on Nicehash was mining for the attacker to their pool and getting a bonus for doing so. Just a theory, but I was mining on Nicehash at the time and saw my 8 cards go from $12/day to 17$/day on L2r2 for hours. It all seems to fit together, and it just took x amount of BTC to get the whole thing to go down between Verge and Nicehash, not that it is the fault of either entity.