The price of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), a cryptocurrency created back in August of 2017 through a hard fork of the Bitcoin network, has seen its price rise by nearly 150% this week, a performance that outshines bitcoin’s nearly 30% gains.
According to CryptoCompare data, BCH was trading at little under $150 earlier this month, but has since surged to trade at $321.4 at press time. In the last 24-hour period the cryptocurrency is up by 9%, and in the last 30 days it has seen its price rise by 149.5%.
Analysts have pointed to various factors to explain what’s behind the cryptocurrency’s price performance and while it’s currently unclear exactly what’s behind the surge, various factors may have contributed.
Recently, bitcoin itself reached a five-month high thanks to a mysterious 20,000 BTC buy order. The order helped the rest of the cryptocurrency market grow, BCH included. While some have pointed out Japan has more BCH accepting physical shops than BTC, there may be more in BTC’s rally supporting BCH’s growth.
Fees on the bitcoin network have since started rising, and at press time most fee estimating websites point to a $2 transaction fee to be included in the next block. Fees on the Bitcoin Cash network are currently smaller. Data suggest bitcoin users overpay in transaction fees, which could mean demand for BCH went up over BTC’s fees.
In September of last year, BCH underwent a stress test that saw its miners process over 2 million transactions in a single day, without seeing transaction fees rise.
Median transaction fee, April 3rd, 2019:
BTC: $1.045
BCH: $0.0008 pic.twitter.com/bT1nDUmpAG— Bitcoin (@Bitcoin) April 4, 2019
Other factors that could be behind the cryptocurrency’s rise could, nevertheless, revolve around adoption and other developments. The BCH community has launched a service that allows users to anonymize their transactions called CashShuffle, and is set to soon implement Schnorr Signatures and SegWit recovery in its May hard fork.
Schnorr Signatures will essentially help optimize the cryptocurrency’s blockchain by improving its capacity, while SegWit recovery will enable BCH users to recover funds accidentally sent to SegWit addresses.
Bitcoin Cash has also recently launched an “inexpensive and powerful” tokenization system, the Simple Ledger Protocol. It essentially allows users to launch tokens on the BCH network, in a way similar to the one in which tokens are launched on the Ethereum network.
As the controversial Bitcoin account on Twitter notes, websites like Lazyfox and Taskopus have been appeared, allowing users to earn BCH for completing tasks, or to pay others for small tasks. These add demand for the cryptocurrency.
