Bitcoin cash rose upwards of 50% in the space of a week, outperforming several major digital currencies as anticipation surrounding the upcoming hard fork drove prices higher. The fork of the original bitcoin, which came into existence in August 2017, reached $608.35 at 09:34 UTC (roughly 4:30 a.m.
ET) today, according to CoinMarketCap .
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT At this price, the digital currency had risen 47.
8% from its intra-week low of $411.
52 reached at 10:04 UTC (approximately 5 a.m. ET) on October 31, additional CoinMarketCap figures show.
[Ed. note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]
Bitcoin Cash Leaves Top Cryptos Behind
By notching these gains, bitcoin cash managed to outshine several other digital currencies, which have in some cases been vying for the top spots near market leader bitcoin.
During the aforementioned time frame, bitcoin, the world’s largest digital currency by market capitalization (market cap), rose only 1.8%, climbing from $6,323.63 to $6,435.91. Bitcoin has been experiencing a lot of range-bound trading as cryptocurrencies struggle with a sustained bear market.
Ether, the second-largest digital currency by market cap at the time of this writing, rose roughly 9% during this period, climbing from $196.53 to $214.
23.
XRP, a digital token which has repeatedly captured the second-highest spot when ranked by market value, experienced a much more impressive gain, rising approximately 20.3%.
EOS, a digital token designed to power a next-generation blockchain platform, also pushed higher, gaining more than 10% during the period.
Pending Hard Fork
Bitcoin cash, which was itself created by a hard fork, is scheduled to fork again on November 15.
Bitcoin ABC, a bitcoin cash client, wishes to make some upgrades to the platform’s existing technology on that date. Importantly, Bitcoin ABC wishes to keep the digital currency’s blog size at 32MB.
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These two sides have been vying for support, trying to get miners and mining pools onboard with their objectives.
As the fork approaches, investors have been buying up bitcoin cash in order to receive the digital currency that will be created by this event.
“The hard fork brought back memories of last year” and the so-called “dividends” that many investors received in the form of new tokens, said Charles Hayter, cofounder and CEO of digital currency data platform CryptoCompare .
He emphasized that the hard fork has generated substantial news coverage, which in turn draws more attention to the digital currency.
Joshua Frank, co-founder of cryptocurrency analytics platform TheTIE.io , offered a similar point of view.
“Conversations over social media drive sentiment and price,” he emphasized.
“As TheTIE.io predictive data showed there is nothing worse than not being talked about,” said Frank.
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT “In the case of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, high positive sentiment tweet volume led trading volume and the significant increase in BCH’s price.”
Frank went on to illustrate how changes in social media activity can have a significant impact on trading volume.
“When tweet volume began to spike on November 2nd, we saw that trading volume followed closely behind. Between November 2nd and November 5th we saw that tweet volume tripled while trading volume increased 6X.
”
“The weekly chart below demonstrates the very strong correlation between the increase in tweet volume and subsequent rise in trading volume. Tweet volume is the orange line and trading volume is the gray bars.”
This graph shows the relationship between social media activity and trading volume. Source: TheTIO.io
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether..