The bitcoin price dropped below $5,700 on Tuesday, as traders rebalanced their portfolios to stake larger positions in altcoins following the Bitcoin Gold hard fork. The ethereum price saw an 8% recovery, while two top 10 cryptocurrencies — Dash and NEO — posted double-digit increases.
Altogether, the cryptocurrency market cap added about $700 million on Tuesday, even as bitcoin dropped more than 3%. After beginning the day at $166.8 billion, the total cryptocurrency market cap ebbed and flowed but eventually ticked up to a present value of $169.5 billion.
Bitcoin Price Dips Following Bitcoin Gold Fork
As CCN has reported, a Hong Kong developer intends to create an altcoin that shares a blockchain history with Bitcoin. To do this, the developer creates a “snapshot” of the blockchain at a specific moment in time; that snapshot will serve as the starting point for Bitcoin Gold, even though transactions continue to occur on the original Bitcoin blockchain in the meantime.
The Bitcoin Gold blockchain snapshot took place early Tuesday morning, so, as with the Bitcoin Cash fork on August 1, users who held bitcoin balances at the time of the fork will receive an equivalent amount of bitcoin gold following its official launch. Even though almost nobody expects bitcoin gold to amount to much, traders had been accumulating bitcoins prior to the snapshot to maximize any potential profits they can extract from the fork.
Now that the snapshot has taken place, traders can sell their bitcoins without missing out on the bitcoin gold airdrop, and they began to do so immediately almost immediately after the fork.
A few hours prior to the fork, the bitcoin price was trading as high as $5,984. As soon as the fork occurred, the bitcoin price began to plunge, eventually reaching as low as $5,580. The bitcoin price has since recovered to a present value of $5,690, but this nevertheless represents a 24-hour decline of 3.5%. Bitcoin now has a market cap of $94.7 billion.
Ethereum Price Recovers Past $300
The ethereum price had been in decline since the activation of the Byzantium protocol upgrade last week, but it finally began to recover on Tuesday as traders began to explore potential avenues for profit outside of bitcoin. After beginning the day at $289 and dipping as low as $278 Monday evening, the ethereum price reversed its trajectory and leaped across the $300 threshold. At present, the ethereum price is trading at $308; this represents a daily increase of 8% and translates into a $29.4 billion market cap.
Altcoins Back in Style
Ethereum was not the only cryptocurrency that saw a recovery on Tuesday. Every top 10 altcoin, excluding bitconnect, made positive movement for the day.
The ripple price rose 6%, bringing the third-ranked cryptocurrency’s market cap back above the $8 billion mark. The bitcoin cash price increased by 2% to $330, and the litecoin price rose 6% to $58. Sixth-ranked dash achieved a 10% bump, bringing its price to $295 and market cap to $2.3 billion.
NEM rose 5% to $0.213, and NEO surged by 12% to raise its price to $31. Bitconnect declined by 3%, reducing its price to $197, and monero rounded out the top 10 with a 5% price increase to $90