The price of Bitcoin Cash achieved $2,800 for the first time in its short three-month history on November 12, as it became the sole beneficiary of the cancellation of the SegWit2x hard fork.
But, it struggled to sustain its upward momentum in the short-term, plunging to $1,100 from over $2,800 within the past two days. Since then, the price of Bitcoin Cash has stabilized at around $1,110.
Factors Behind the Bitcoin Cash Price Surge
During the unforeseen increase in the price of Bitcoin Cash, the daily trading volume of the cryptocurrency market surged to $22 billion, to a new all-time high. In the same period, the combined market valuation of all of the cryptocurrencies in the market remained identical at around $200 billion.
Hence, it was unlikely that that new investors were engaging in bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash trading over the past three days. Rather, it likely were existing traders or bitcoin investors moving their large amounts of their funds from bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash.
From November 11 to 13, Bithumb, the South Korean cryptocurrency market’s largest exchange by trading volume and also the world’s second largest trading platform, was at the epicenter of attention from the cryptocurrency community. It accounted for nearly 50 percent of all trades, with Korbit and Coinone, other two South Korean exchanges, accounting for nearly 11 percent of the trades.
In all, around 61 percent of Bitcoin Cash trading was processed in South Korea.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges have integrated Bitcoin Cash well before the recent price surge of the Bitcoin Cash. Thus, the argument that the integration of Bitcoin Cash by Bithumb, Korbit, and Coinone caused the price of Bitcoin Cash to go up is invalid. Also, it is also difficult to justify the abrupt rise in the price of Bitcoin Cash as organic growth, given that its price has fallen by more than 60 percent in just two days.
Interestingly, South Korea is the only major cryptocurrency market which remains unregulated, despite it being the third largest market for bitcoin and the largest market for both Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. More to that, the vast majority of leading cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea have zero-fee policy, similar to China in 2016.
Because of Bithumb’s zero-fee policy, it is possible to manipulate the trading volumes of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, as bitcoin traders did on Chinese exchanges in 2016. Only a year ago, the bitcoin community believed that China was accountable for 90 percent of global trades. Eventually, it was discovered that the Chinese market accounted for only 15 percent of global trades.
Can Bitcoin Cash Grow at a Consistent Pace?
As Xapo President Ted Rogers explained, the recent price trend of Bitcoin Cash was not sustainable. But, Bitcoin Cash does have a market it can serve for immediate payments and short-term scaling. Bitcoin and security expert Andreas Antonopoulos noted:
“Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash will coexist and serve different use cases, just like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its not a zero sum game. Work on building your project, not on destroying the other.”
In the long-term, like Ethereum demonstrated an exponential growth rate since 2015, it is possible that Bitcoin Cash can grow at a consistent pace, if the businesses, investors, and infrastructure that supposed SegWit2x do in fact migrate over to Bitcoin Cash.