The price of bitcoin maintained flat on Friday, while Bitcoin Cash has surged beyond $500 amid the growing chances of another bitcoin split.
Bitcoin price remained relatively steady in early trading today, showing just a small 2% decrease. The pause in its upward movement follows a sharp upturn on Thursday, when the cryptocurrency hit a new all-time high of $4,400. Currently, it is valued at $4174, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
In line with “>Bitcoin Cash news, it climbed by over 75% in 24 hours after the first 8MB block was mined on the alternative version of bitcoin blockchain. On Thursday, the value of the digital currency surpassed $400 level after a week of fluctuating at around $300 level.
Over the past few hours, more than $1 billion have been traded in Bitcoin Cash, what makes it the third largest cryptocurrency in terms of trading volume. At the moment of writing, Bitcoin Cash is estimated at $578, with its market cap is standing at $9,5 billion, CoinMarketCap shows.
The price of the cryptocurrency has soared amid uncertainty regarding further bitcoin split and high possibility of the second fork. A new post by BitPay about the upcoming SegWit activation suggests that Bitcoin Core might face another fork in the future. Some argued that this would make Bitcoin Cash the longest blockchain, what is driving the price growth.
On August 16, more than two weeks after the bitcoin split, the mining pool Bitclub Network mined 8MB block, which cleared more than 37,000 BCH transactions. So far, it is the biggest block found on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Two hours later another block of 4MB was mined on the network.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin Cash continues to gain industry support from virtual currency companies. This week, Breadwallet made BCH available on both Android and iOS mobile platforms. Bitpay has recently announced that they would enable users of its Copay and Bitpay wallets to access the token, although they do not plan to fully support the cryptocurrency.
GDAX, the cryptocurrency exchange operated by Coinbase, has recently announced plans to launch support for Bitcoin Cash by January 1, 2018. A week before the announcement, Coinbase stated it would not accept the new digital currency. Earlier this week, Swiss bank, Falcon Private Bank, revealed that it would expand its blockchain asset management services to more digital currencies, including Bitcoin Cash.
Supporters of BCH remain positive about the future of the cryptocurrency, which attracted a lot of interest this month. According to Google Trends, there have been more searches for “Bitcoin Cash” than for “Ethereum” this week.
Meantime, there are some platforms that refused to support the new cryptocurrency. As a result, many users lost an access to their funds. While technically holding Bitcoin Cash, they were unable to claim the money. However, the problem seems to be solved as BTC.com has launched a recovery instrument to allow customers return their money by moving Bitcoin Cash into new digital wallets.
“Recovering Bitcoin Cash from a bitcoin wallet in a do-it-yourself manner can be a risky process that requires serious expertise. That’s why we have developed this designated recovery tool, to make the process easy and seamless for everyone. BTC.com is committed to serving our users by continuing to deliver the best technology platform for bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash,” the company wrote in a blog post.
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