Let's see if it succeeds or the greed inside the market will kill this project.
It will take more than a few pigs to kill the honey badger.
I think that they chose the wrong tactic with trying to create stability. It would have been easier to pump the market and create a new steady rise. They could of even created an illusion that a lot of people are buying bitcoins through this new service and most would believe that the rise is real. If the price is slowly rising then the cash transfer service will get good reputation, because your sum can actually rise during the transfer.
Rises can be more easily controlled and are more stable. This artificial stability makes the market nervous and can cause a big enough dump, that is too strong to control.
That's assuming anyone was trying to create stability to begin with. I think there are enough actors in this market with different motivations that making a general assumption like that is probably unwise.
Tell me about these different (f)actors and motivations then.
Telling me that "your theory could be wrong, because there could be other answers" isn't very constructive.
Certainly. The number one reason is probably: To make money for themselves. Then again, maybe that is exactly what you were saying? I just think that there are many players who use different methods to attempt to make money for themselves. It sounds like you are attributing the market movements to a single entity known as "they".
Well, yes. It's not very hard to answer the first question "Why is someone doing it?" with an answer "Someone wants to make money."
But now we can ask another question "Why would someone benefit on the price being stable?". Because the price was kept stable artificially, with releasing upwards or downwards pressure as soon as the price started to move away from 800. Someone thought that it is beneficial to keep the price at this nice round number. Considering the amount of liquidity needed to power control the market price like this, we can see that this someone is no lightweight. Now another question comes up "Why a heavyweight player needs the price to be a nice round number". Well there is this option that someone is dumping and is keeping the price up artificially to get a better price. But why the nice round number? Why not just go over it to stimulate even more buys? It doesn't make much sense that a dumper would be motivated to do so.
That someone needs to promote bitcoin as an stable currency that can be used to hold or transfer money with minimum risk of loss. Now, I haven't heard that there are new well funded services out there that promote bitcoin as an Store of Value option, but as we can see, ZipZap does want to use bitcoin to start an cash transfer service. Considering the potential and the amount invested, then it's logical that there should be enough liquidity left to keep the price stable for the starting period, to show that there is no risk in using this service. Imagine if ZipZap starts it's new service and within days there are drops and their first clients actually lose a big amount of that sum that they wanted to transfer? It would be an disaster and the only clients they would get, are the ones who like the cash anonymity option to buy drugs. Without assurance that there is no risk, the cash transfer part won't ever pick up.
So, with this reasoning, I'm pretty certain in saying that this stability was created to boost the cash transfer potential of bitcoin. And if this potential is relized then we could actually see 1BTC=10 000$+. I think this is the only way that bitcoin can develop further and become something more then an innovative gambling platform.
I myself am not very sure that they will succeed though, because they have chosen an very hard task. Stability is the main factor that is needed with going to the cash transfer market. But bitcoin wasn't created to be stable, it was created for it's value to be in an constant rise. But this deflative nature of it, creates a lot of instability caused by speculation. So, if someone wants to use bitcoin to use as an intermediate tool for cash transfers, then that someone has to make bitcoin stable. But the only way to do that, is to control enough bitcoins that you can basicly be the "central bank", with regulating the inflow of new coins according to the market situation.
I think that this will be too hard and this project will fail. It will probably pick up again with new cryptos that have more favorable properties for keeping the price stable.