You are right. It's not a good sign.
But if you dig deeper into Gridcoin happenings and zoom out to see a 2 month period, we will see there was those issues with the blockchain... GRC had a bug in the code, what exploded like a time bomb.
The whole chain was forked into about 10 thousand different chains in a few days, and the wallets went unusable, the markets were informed and asked about to suspend their transactions until a fix.
(And we know, unusable blockchain can easily cause a death of a coin...)
I think this was the main issue because when some markets opened few weeks ago, then everbody started to sell their investments. It's good for those like me, because I can buy a lot of cheap Grc. :D

And yes... It has more "added value" than those famous shitcrap quicklife ICO tokencoin thingies, what "just exists" without any meaning.

And don't misunderstand me. Yes. This drop is a very bad sign. And I don't like it :/
But I know why it's happening.