Bitcoin prices were remarkably steady on Thursday, as markets welcomed a new version of the digital currency following the Aug. 1 fork.
After reaching $2,900.00 on the day of the fork, bitcoin prices have stabilized north of $2,700.00. The BTC/USD traded within a $23 range on Thursday, retaining a market cap of roughly $45.2 billion.
The digital currency’s technical picture remains solid, but its fundamental outlook has changed. While the newly minted Bitcoin Cash has not undercut bitcoin’s value yet, the creation of multiple forks could trigger uncertainty about the market’s future.
The Aug. 1 hard fork amounted to a split in the digital payment system, as the blockchain community sought new means for handling disagreements over how the underlying technology should run.
The short history of Bitcoin Cash (BCC) has been a turbulent one. Prices spiked above $700.00 on Wednesday, which translated into a gain of more than 130%. The rapid rise gave the new currency a market cap of over $10 billion.
The new token’s value was last pegged at $482.50, which represents a gain of 12% from the previous close.
The fork in bitcoin’s blockchain has triggered infighting in the digital currency community, with some exchanges rejecting the new token entirely. Chief among them is Coinbase, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which decided last week not to support Bitcoin Cash. An activist group have threatened to sue Coinbase for its decision, equating it to a brokerage withholding new shares from its investors.
The group’s stated mission to allow users to “trade or withdraw the Bitcoin cash tokens that rightfully belong to them following the 8/1/2017 Bitcoin hard fork.”
Coinbase set out its decision on Bitcoin Cash in a July 27 blog post. The platform has seen an exodus of users ever since.