Bitcoin Cash Surges Over $1000 Ahead of Its Scheduled Hard Fork in May
Crypto markets are seen gaining significant momentum in the last 24-hours as the overall market valuations have now touched $370 billion after a week-long consolidation at $350 billion. However leading the show this time if the first Bitcoin derivative - Bitcoin Cash - which has shown a strong upward movement above $1,000 as many traders try to grab this digital currency ahead of its hard fork scheduled in May next month.
According to our data, Bitcoin Cash is trading 50% up from its price last week precisely at $1109, at the press time. Since the start of April, Bitcoin Cash has shown a phenomenal recovery over 80% from its low of around $600 earlier this month. At today’s price, the market cap for Bitcoin Cash has surged over 18 Billion.
Bitcoin Cash was created last year in August 2017 as a result of the hard fork in the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin Cash blockchain has a block size of 8MB against that of Bitcoin which has a 1MB blockchain. The Bitcoin Cash was created in order to reduce network congestion thereby allowing more transactions to be processed in a given time.
However, another hard fork in the Bitcoin Cash itself shows that developers have still a lot to do in terms of solving the scalability issues. This is one of the primary reasons causing hurdle in the mass adoption of digital tokens by retail participants.
The upcoming hard fork of Bitcoin Cash scheduled on the 15th of May is expected to further increase the block size to 32MB expanding the capacity of processing transaction four times from now.
Apart from this, the network upgrade is expected to reactivate and add several operation codes. Analysts believe that simplified smart contracts will also be possible on the upgraded Bitcoin Cash network. This is one of the major reasons in the latest surge in the price of Bitcoin Cash. The optimism around the new features is pulling traders and investors.
In addition to Bitcoin Cash, other alt coins like Ethereum and Ripple are seen making significant up moves over the last fews days. In the past three days Ripple price has surged over 30% and is currently trading at $0.86. Ethereum too is seen touching important milestones and is trading at $600.