The Crash of Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin cash (BCH) has dropped more than 40 percent since November 12. Once the news came out of the SegWit2X Cancellation, the market sentiment shifted towards BCH, which soared more than 150 percent in a single day.
Dramatic Shift in BCH Price
The price of BCH went to $2,500 for a short time this weekend followed by a sharp decline. The current trading value is approximately $1,190. Before the news of the canceled fork, bitcoin was trading at around $6,800 and then fell to $5,500 with fiat moving from bitcoin to bitcoin cash.
Bitcoin has since regained its lost capital with the price pushing past $6,500. Some commentators described the move as a typical pump-and-dump which often happens to altcoins.
The effect of weekend madness was not limited to investors. Korean exchange, Bithumb, one of the world’s busiest bitcoin exchanges went down over the weekend. The high fluctuations in cryptocurrencies leading to higher trading volumes led to the crash. The exchange pointed explicitly to BCH for its outage.
Indian exchange, Koinex, also went down the same night because of network congestion. On the other hand, some exchanges, like Bitfinex, made approximately $7 million in trading fees.
Novogratz and Buterin
At the time of bitcoin’s return, there were some winners like billionaire investor Michael Novogratz, who claim to have bought between $15 and $25 million bitcoin at almost $5,500.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, tweeted to congratulate people behind BCH:
Congrats on this. Seriously. @rogerkver @JihanWu @deadalnix pic.twitter.com/UXYdEcRn4y
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 12, 2017
An hour later, he tweeted his confidence in cryptocurrency in general via the strength of its ecosystem:
A key reason why I am now so confident in crypto is precisely the fact that there are so many different teams trying different approaches.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 12, 2017
These comments refer to the moments when BCH briefly took over the number two spot of Ethereum by topping its market cap of $30 billion.
As of now, bitcoin is still the top trading cryptocurrency, with Ethereum back to second and BCH at third regarding the market cap. The cryptosphere has maintained its thrill and unpredictability for the weekend, but let’s see what future holds for us. There’s still a long way to go for any cryptocurrency to take over Bitcoin.
