Bitcoiners have had a wild weekend from November 11 to 12, as bitcoin keeps struggling to maintain its price above the $6,600 mark, after plunging from $7,300 to $5,600 in only two days. As recently covered by CCN, the number one cryptocurrency recently developed a backlog of over 100,000 transactions, in which millions worth of bitcoin are stuck, waiting for confirmations.
Bitcoin Cash, partly thanks to the cancellation of the SegWit2x hard fork, saw its value surge this week to the point it briefly surpassed the market cap of Ethereum at $30 billion. The cryptocurrency reached an all-time high above $2,400 before its price corrected, to about $1,092.91 at press time, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Dash, on the other hand, went relatively unnoticed by the cryptocurrency community this week, although its value significantly rose. On November 7, Dash was at about $275 per token, while at press time the cryptocurrency is up by 27.46 percent in the last 24 hours, as a token is now worth $436.73 and the cryptocurrency’s market cap surpassed $3.2 billion. Its surge has been so significant, Dash hit a new all-time high of $530.94 this week.
Dash has been rising due to a number of reasons: among them a recent upgrade, the struggles Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash have been dealing with, and various published press releases.
Block size increase
Bitcoiners recently saw the cancellation of the SegWit2x hard fork, which would double block size in bitcoin’s network to 2 MB. This led various investors, who were expecting the SegWit2x token “airdrop”, to sell their bitcoin as they would no longer receive it, and led various big block supporters to invest in Bitcoin Cash due to its 8 MB limit.
While an 8 MB limit makes Bitcoin Cash the favorite cryptocurrency among the big block crowd, Dash’s recent update includes a block size upgrade on its network that has certainly caught the attention of various big blockers.
Furthermore, Dash has its own scalability plan that’s focused on on-chain scaling, which developers in a few other projects, including bitcoin, believe not to be a good option. On a Medium blog post, Dash’s founder Evan Duffield stated:
“Many projects in the space believe that on-chain scaling is impossible. That’s simply because they haven’t explored alternative P2P architectures for higher performance. We intend to show just how far an incentivized second tier architecture can take a project like Dash.”
Dash Core software upgrade
This week, Dash release a new version of the Dash Core software. With it, came various new features and improvements, including the implementation of a 2 MB block size, and a transaction fee reduction that should attract bitcoiners tired of the network’s fees.
The upgrade also fixes vulnerabilities, bugs, and improves the cryptocurrency’s system. It’s part of the Dash Evolution upgrade, which is expected for late next year, and aims to make cryptocurrency incredibly easy to use, so that everyone can benefit from it.
Dash’s network is unique, as it allocates about 10% of block rewards to fund projects. Among them are some promoting the cryptocurrency, such as Dashforce. As the network upgrade rolled out, press releases were published on various websites, further helping the cryptocurrency grow.