Top Cryptocurrencies Up, Riding On Anticipated Bitcoin Cash Hardfork

The cryptocurrency market seems to be looking positive as the prices of bitcoin and other top currencies have risen 2-5 percent in a 24-hour period.

Bitcoin has gone up by almost 2 percent in the last 24 hours. The cryptocurrency was trading $6,301 at 8:38 a.m Monday EST and it went up to $6,479 at 9:04 p.m Monday. It's a known fact that any change in bitcoin prices will impact the prices of most other cryptocurrencies. The highest gainers among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap are ethereum, up by 4.26 percent; bitcoin cash, up by 5.02 percent; litecoin, up by 4.73 percent; and monero, up by 4.35 percent, as tracked by CMC.

Bitcoin cash, which is ranked fourth on CoinMarketCap, has rise 24 percent since its last dip Oct. 31— from $418 to $578. The rise came after the world’s largest crypto-exchange Binance, by trade volume, and Bitcoin.com declared their plans for a bitcoin cash hardfork (a single cryptocurrency splitting into two). Both companies had indicated their decision to support the bitcoin cash version in the event of a fork in a statement.

A report published by Bloomberg Nov. 3 indicated that bitcoin is now less volatile than the stock market. It said that bitcoin’s price volatility is lower than that of the S&P 500 index, a U.S. stock market index based on the market capitalizations of 500 large companies. Using a 10-day historical volatility measure, the S&P 500’s volatility for the past week was 27. This is almost twice what bitcoin recorded: only 15.7, said Bloomberg.

This is probably one the reason why there is more institutional money inflow into the crypto market, thereby resulting in a price hike. A recent report by Morgan Stanley, titled “Update: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain, quoted Alex Kruger, an Argentinian market specialist, who claimed that there have “been considerable institutional inflows since January" impliying that cryptocurrency asset values are fit for the current institutional preference.

This pattern suggests that the crypto market does get influenced by any movement that happens in the traditional stock market. On Oct. 12, it was reported that the cryptocurrency market saw all major tokens fall by almost 5 percent, wiping out about $13 billion from their total market capitalization. At that time David Thomas, director and co-founder of GlobalBlock, a cryptocurrency brokerage firm in the United Kingdom, suggested this kind of volatility in the cryptocurrency market could indicate that more "seasoned investors" with wider portfolios are getting into cryptocurrencies and are using similar equity strategies to manage their positions.

“Having seen global stock markets take a battering in the last 24 hours on trade fears and rising interest rates as well as the price of gold and the VIX Volatility Index heading higher, it is strange that we now see the crypto market also following suit. There was a growing feeling that Bitcoin (BTC) was a 'digital gold' asset and as such should weather such wider storms as equity market volatility," Thomas told International Business Times.