To say Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is on a roll right now is an understatement.
Currently valued at US$4.5bn, the altcoin has surged a whopping 121% in the past seven days, significantly outpacing the next top riser among the top-100 altcoin set (being the PEPE meme coin, in case you were interested).
So what is driving Bitcoin Cash’s moonshot right now?
What is Bitcoin Cash?
Not to be confused with bitcoin (BTC) itself, Bitcoin Cash is what is known as a ‘hard fork’ of the original bitcoin blockchain network.
Hard forks essentially take an original piece of software, copy it, make some adjustments and repackage it as something new.
An historically significant example of this is Fire OS, the operating system for Amazon’s Kindle device, which was forked from Android source code in 2011.
In Bitcoin Cash’s case, in 2017 a group of anonymous developers wanted to return bitcoin to its roots as a decentralised payment system, an ambition long forgotten but the Bitcoin Core community in place of financial gains.
To do this, this group of developers tweaked bitcoin’s source code to make it hundreds of times cheaper and significantly faster than its big brother could ever hope to be.
Which is not to say that Bitcoin Cash (BCH) necessarily succeeded in its plans.
Though BCH is indeed significantly faster and quicker than BTC, its value had tanked over 96% from its all-time high prior to this week’s pump.
Trading volumes were averaging less than one percent of bitcoin’s, yet they have since increased to 6% of bitcoin’s trading volumes in recent days in conjunction with BCH’s massive price rally.
Big Money boosts BCH
The source of this impressive price action for a relatively obscure cryptoasset can be traced back to last Tuesday’s official launch of the new EDX cryptocurrency exchange.
Back by Big Money players Charles Schwab (NYSE:NYSE:SCHW), Fidelity and Citadel Securities, EDX is targeting institutional clients who have lots of cash to spare.
To stay on the side of the US regulators, EDX is extremely picky with what it provides, with only four cryptocurrencies made available for trading. Bitcoin Cash, alongside bitcoin, ether and Litecoin, is one of them.
Will Bitcoin Cash rally continue?
“I would say it’s mostly sentiment related — both are not tokens that are widely used and generally considered coins from the past cycle,” Benjamin Stani at Matrixport told yahoo!finance.
That’s a no from Stani then, but with historically low trading volumes and little else sustaining it barring a recent hype rally, his position is a valid one to hold.
One other potential benefit of BCH is that, as a hard fork of bitcoin, it could go under the radar of hawkish US regulators.
Though with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s anti-crypto warpath kicking into overdrive this year, nothing is a given.