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The bitcoin cash price on Monday made a charge back toward the $200 level, bolstered by the announcement that CoinGeek had formally called for an end to the “hash war” that had threatened to destabilize the BCH network following this month’s contentious hard fork.
Bitcoin Cash Price Crosses $200 But Pares Gains
After entering the day trading near $180, BCH traded down to about $175 before staging a major ascent at approximately 10:00 UTC. At several points, BCH/USD crossed $200, though it was never able to break past an intraday high of $204 and has since pared its gains and ebbed back to a present value of $194 as of the time of writing. This represents a 24-hour increase of about 17 percent and translates into a $3.5 billion market cap.
The BCH rally was accompanied by about $275 million in daily trading volume, much of which was concentrated on South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges. Upbit’s BCH/KRW trading pair alone accounted for more than a third of BCH’s global volume, while the Malta-based Binance attracted approximately 20 percent of bitcoin cash volume to its USDT and BTC markets.
CoinGeek Calls off BCH ‘Hash War’
While the crypto market as a whole saw a moderate recovery on Monday, bitcoin cash was far and a way the large-cap index’s top performer, as no other top 10-cryptocurrency managed to rise more than 7 percent.
At least some of its ascent may be attributable to today’s announcement that CoinGeek — previously the largest bitcoin cash mining pool and the chief backer of BCH splinter group Bitcoin SV (BSV) — had formally called for a permanent blockchain split between BCH and BSV, complete with replay protection to protect user funds on both networks.
Previously, BSV’s formal stance had been to resist calls for a permanent split, alleging that BSV-aligned miners would repeatedly attack the Bitcoin ABC chain (now called “Bitcoin Cash” on most exchanges and crypto services) until it capitulated to the BCH version promoted by CoinGeek founder Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright.
However, as predicted, BSV backers began to waver on that stance after it became clear that they did not have the dominant hash power they expected to have following the Nov. 15 hard fork. Accordingly, they have resigned themselves to the fact that, to survive, they must relinquish the BCH branding and carry on as a separate, minority blockchain — at least in the near-term.
“After Bitcoin Core became SegWit coin last year, our mission has always been to make sure the original Bitcoin survives and succeeds. With its series of radical and unilateral code changes in just the last week, ABC’s BCH has departed so far from the original Bitcoin that it is now an alt-coin developer experiment and we no longer have any interest in it or its tarnished brand,” said Calvin Ayre in a press release. “Bitcoin SV fought to preserve the Satoshi Vision, and is the original Bitcoin. We will now focus entirely on building upon an already vibrant Bitcoin SV ecosystem.”
He concluded:
“Although ABC may keep the damaged BCH ticker symbol, BSV is winning over BCH’s native application ecosystem in droves. We look forward to out-competing BCH (and BTC) in the marketplace, rather than in further chain battles.”
Featured Image from Shutterstock. Charts from TradingView.
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