There's a huge marketing push at the moment for this fork as well on one of the Bitcoin subreddits. I suspect it's being pushed by ViaBTC, which just launched "futures trading" for it (as well as probably being the only miner), and has a lot of $ to gain by people trading on their service.

EDIT: yeah, totally organic growth I'm sure https://screenshots.firefox.com/1Jd3clym3pT37nAH/www.reddit....