Over $13 billion has been wiped off the market cap of all cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The market cap across all cryptocurrencies was roughly $93 billion yesterday morning. Today, it was under $80 billion.
CoinMarketCap shows that Bitcoin has seen an almost-9% decline in its US dollar price.
While Bitcoin has been among the currencies least affected by the downturn, reports about the crash are linking the downturn to uncertainty over the future of Bitcoin.
This comes as two factions compete for the heart of Bitcoin.
The big Bitcoin fight
On one side of the battle are the miners who proposed an increase of the blockchain size limit from 1MB to 2MB. On the other side is a group called Bitcoin Core, which criticised a straight blockchain size increase as not addressing the main problems the Bitcoin blockchain faces.
Core has suggested a technology called Segregated Witness, or SegWit. However, due to the standoff with Bitcoin’s miners, the majority of which are based in China, Core supporters have called for a user-activated soft fork on 1 August.
The premise is that the economic majority of Bitcoin blockchain users will move to a new standard that supports SegWit, with the aim to force miners to adopt the proposal.
If miners do not adopt SegWit, it could cause the currency to split, called a “fork”.
Miners have offered a counter proposal, called SegWit2x, which Bloomberg said about 85% of miners will back.
Until the outcome of the activation of SegWit2x and the user-activated soft fork, analysts have warned to expect even higher levels of volatility in