The sunlight broke the new day with some bright good news in the crypto world! The discussion now is all about the price of Bitcoin (BTC) moved like a shooting star, reaching a new all-time high (ATH) of staggering $122,555. And, altcoins followed Bitcoin, keeping pace with the pulse of the surge.
Among the altcoins that glittered stands Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the hard fork of Bitcoin. Although it’s getting less buzz with a lower adoption rate and brand confusion due to a similar name to BTC, the coin has reached $516.9 amid the whole market hike. But, wait, before we look into its performance, let’s dig into what exactly is Bitcoin Cash. Is it something related to Bitcoin or stays as an independent altcoin?
The coin that diverged from the king of all the coins
Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by the anonymous brain behind it, Satoshi Nakamoto. As time passed, the Bitcoin network gained popularity and faced scalability issues, slow transactions, and high fees, leading to a discussion in the community.
The core point was to solve Bitcoin’s 1 MB block size limit, and this is how Bitcoin Cash, or BCH, was born in 2017 after a fiery debate.
BCH is typically a hard fork, an altcoin that is split from the Bitcoin blockchain, a technical divergence in the codebase. A hard fork creates a new blockchain sharing the same history as the original blockchain until the split. Once the split happens, the new blockchain, or on-chain, follows its own rules.
Highly scalable, but less secure
BCH has the answer to the scalability issues of Bitcoin. The altcoin has a block size from 8 MB to 32 MB, low fees, and faster transactions. However, its security is a question when compared to Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash has also divided into Bitcoin SV (BSV).
Happy mood for BCH as the crypto market meets broader optimism
The price of BCH escalated in the wake of the entire market spike, and the Bitcoin price soared to $121,543. The hard fork altcoin hovered at $517.73, at the time of reporting, with a 2.4% gain over the past 24 hours and a 4.10% hike over the past week. The coin holds the 16th position by market capitalization.
BCH price surges amid market rally. Source: CoinMarketCap
As Bitcoin’s coattails, BCH has the potential to blink green, and this works as a minor reason why BCH is performing high. The key reasons for the growth are due to the whole market uptrend, as is evident.
Major reasons for the price hike
Quite a few strong reasons drive the current price trend. Massive Bitcoin acquisition by big institutions like Strategy, BlackRock, and Metaplanet has weighed in as the catalyst for the market price rally. Large ETF inflows, a crypto-positive environment in the US, the SEC dropping lawsuit against Ripple, Coinbase, and Binance, have also reportedly ignited high market performance.
It’s been a very, very, strong move over the past six or seven days, and it’s hard to see where it stops now. It looks like it can easily have a look at the $125,000 level,” Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG, a market insight provider, shared his thoughts with Reuters news agency.
For Gracie Lin, CEO of OKX, Singapore, the current price hike denotes that “Bitcoin is being seen as a long-term reserve asset” by central banks rather than by retail institutions and investors.
Bitcoin surpassed Amazon, becoming the fifth-largest asset by market cap.
Good stories are moving towards Bitcoin besides institutional adoptions and huge ETF inflows. The digital gold has reached fifth among the top assets in the world by market cap. The king coin achieved $2.42 trillion market cap out of $3.81 trillion crypto market cap. All these major factors have stimulated the price of Bitcoin and other altcoins, including Bitcoin Cash.
