I think your mention of Diamond Fields and Voisey's Bay and to connect that to Zenyatta is a good one. DF did go up gradually but with sinificant jumps in the share price. Friedland and his partner at the time bought millions of shares at about 15 cents. The final share price sale ( not counting splits ) was $172 a share.

Nickle is a better known commodity and trades in a more open and understood way. Graphite is not understood in the marketplace, and trades on sales to the end user. This is the big difference. As the VB discovery progressed with drilling, so the share price moved up. This has not happened with ZEN. So the ZEN share price has not progressed in a normal fashion like VB did.

VB was bought out for $4.3 B because that was the value put on it by the bidder. There were about 100 M shares out, as best I could find out. Supposing nickle was not understood and the share price had not appreciated over time like it did, you would have had a huge jump in share price. The value of the deposit and a share price are two different things. When values are rational, one determines the other. In the case of ZEN, the share price is saying the graphite deposit is not worth very much.

Much of the debate about the ZEN share price revolves around what the deposit is worth. All the testing being done is to determine its worth. If the numbers come in anywhere near what some of us think, you are going to see the biggest gap up the markets may have ever seen. The chartists like to say that all gaps get filled. This might be the exception.