Bitcoin Cash reached a market cap of over $7 bln in less than 48 hours of its total existence seeing the hard fork of the original Bitcoin the third biggest digital currency in the world.
Bitcoin is still miles ahead, with its cap sitting at over $44 bln. Coming in second is Ethereum with a large haul of its own, sitting on $21 bln while Bitcoin Cash’s $7 bln overtook Ripple, with a market cap of $6.7 bln, for third place.
A freshly re-opened Australian exchange has seen a massive uptick in Bitcoin Cash interest as people sell their original Bitcoin to cash in on what has been speculated as ‘the next big coin.’
Blockchain Global, who just re-opened its exchange, the Australian Cryptocurrency Exchange, says that there is a huge demand for Bitcoin Cash as people put in off-market orders.
Speculating on the boom
Sebastian Quinn-Watson, a venture partner for the Australian exchange, says there have been lots of questions and interest in surrounding Bitcoin Cash since they recently reopened their exchange.
"We literally just re-opened the Bitcoin exchange and are confirming the BCC trades over the course of the day," he said." We are receiving a lot of off market orders for Bitcoin cash - they're exploding!
"People are selling their Bitcoin positions and buying Bitcoin cash as a proposition that it is the 'new coin' that has more value in the future. It's a bit speculative."
A small fork
Considering that the scaling debate on Bitcoin had been raging for years, with threats of a rather large hard fork looming over it, this fork to Bitcoin Cash has been pretty minor.
The fork has not been supported by many mining pools, or even exchanges, as the hashing power sits around two percent for the rival chain.
However, because it is indeed a fork of Bitcoin, there is a shared transactional history between the two new currencies, and as such, holders of Bitcoin are entitled to an equal amount of the breakaway currency.
Another opportunity
While Bitcoin has remained relatively stable for what is essentially a huge change in the digital currency, Quinn-Watson still predicts that Bitcoin will drop a little more as people look for fresh opportunities through the hard fork.
The drop should not be more than 10 or 15 percent over the next 36 hours, according to the Australian.
"Money will pour into Ethereum and Bitcoin cash," Quinn-Watson said."I think the excitement will also bring more people into the market looking to invest."
A move of opposition
Bitcoin Cash was created on Aug. 1 in opposition to a UASF that saw SegWit implemented on the original Bitcoin network.
The opposition was to the implementation of SegWit, as well as the desire to keep the Bitcoin blocks at 1 MB. The Bitcoin Cash blocks are a whopping 8 MB.
The majority of mining pools supported the UASF and SegWit. However, it is a small group of mostly Chinese miners who have pushed for the hard fork, and the implementation of the 8 MB blocks, which has been a plan since 2015.
Everyone has Bitcoin Cash
Because of the nature of a hard fork, Bitcoin Cash has the entire transaction history of Bitcoin attached to it, only at Aug. 1, and the fork is a diverging of ways.
Therefore, users who owned Bitcoin before the fork, and owned their private wallet keys, will have an equal amount of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash – with their duplicate balances existing on each Blockchain.
Tactical trading
The feeling is that because Bitcoin Cash has such low hashpower (only about two percent of Bitcoin’s hashpower is mining the rival chain), and there is not much support from exchanges, users could be waiting to dump the “free”, duplicate, Bitcoin Cash they received in order to transfer it back into the SegWit enabled Bitcoin. This could be having a big impact on the market cap of Bitcoin Cash.