Bitcoin Cash's announcement on Saturday 22nd took the community by surprise and it appears the Bitcoin markets are starting to show signs of nervousness around a potential split on Aug 1st. Bitcoin Cash says that it intends to activate a UAHF on August 1st despite the BIP91 lock-in. They stated that they wanted to scale Bitcoin on-chain via an 8mb blocksize. They have also reduced the difficulty adjustment period from 2,016 blocks to 6 blocks as it is unlikely BCC will attract much hashing power.
A BCC futures market has started trading on ViaBTC, currently at a price of$393.45. Many exchanges have yet to come out with a definitive statement as to whether they will support BCC. BitMEX has stated that they “will not support the split or distribution of Bitcoin Cash”.
As a result of the upcoming UAHF, investors have become concerned given the possibility of replay attacks and general malfunctions on the network. As a result, Bitcoin is down 6.67% in the last 24 hours to $2,499.59 with roughly $519M exchanged on the USD pairs.
Read more here