My guess is that a large number of users have lost interest after they
lost their money in MtGox. The 24th of February coincides with the
"final" shutdown

Sigh. It would not be surprising if MtGox has indeed dealt the community a critical blow in this regard. TX traffic is down since then too:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?timespan=60days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

Judging from comments and the leaked user db, it seems a lot of well known people lost money there   (not me fortunately). I wish I could say people have learned but from the size of the deposit base at Bitstamp they clearly have not. A lot of Bitcoin users don't seem to be ready to be their own bank, yet still want to own some on the assumption everyone else either is or soon will be. So it's really only a matter of time until something goes wrong with some large bitbank again, either Bitstamp or Coinbase.

Some days I wonder if Bitcoin will be killed off by people who just refuse to use it properly before it ever gets a chance to shine. The general public doesn't distinguish between "Bitcoin users" who deposit with a third party and the real Bitcoin users who don't.