Bitcoin Falls 1% in Volatile Day as Ethereum Makes Gains

Bitcoin

 

The price of Bitcoin fell by more than 1% on Tuesday following a cancelled planned software upgrade. In what has been a volatile day’s trading, Bitcoin pulled back from an intraday high of $6699.90 to the current price of $6372.50, down 1.61%. The planned upgrade, called “SegWit2x”, would have approximately doubled the processing capacity of the bitcoin network, bringing down the fees for bitcoin transactions.  Bitcoin has fallen 29% since it hit $7900 on the 8th November. Despite the losses, Bitcoin has risen over 500% in 2017 so far, giving it a  total market cap of around $108 billion.

Bitcoins

Bitcoin Cash

 

The cancellation of the SegWit2x hard fork sparked a bitcoin price fall and saw to a sizable transfer of capital from bitcoin to bitcoin cash. Bitcoin cash briefly replaced Ethereum as the second most traded cryptocurrency, however this was reversed as trading settled down. Bitcoin Cash, which was came into being following another software split on the 1st August,  surged to a record high of $2,790.00 on Sunday. At time of writing, Bitcoin Cash is down 4.0% at $1239.10 which means that Bitcoin Cash now has a total market capitalization of approximately $22 billion, putting it  third in the list of most valuable cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum

 

One altcoin winner today so far has been Ethereum. Trading volume in Ethereum surpassed $1 billion over the last 24 hours, helping push prices up 3.45% to $324.02. At one point during the heavy volume day, prices hit $335.61. The $350 price is proving to be a significant psychological barrier for Ethereum, but analysts predict this could be surpassed this week.