Bitcoin price increased by more than 60% since the beginning of August, as it rose from around $2800 to $4300 earlier today, as most altcoins started recovering following a few weeks of instability. The overall market capital of bitcoin currently exceeds $71 billion. The high volatility witnessed across the bitcoin market during the past few weeks was ignited by deployment of a new soft fork, the Segregated Witness “SegWit”, on bitcoin’s protocol in an attempt to mitigate the currency’s scalability problems.
Bitcoin was in desperate need for a solution to boost the throughput of confirmed transactions along the network. However, the implementation of SegWit, was not a smooth process, as it was rejected by a considerable portion of users, which led to splitting of bitcoin’s blockchain, giving birth to Bitcoin Cash, the first ever cryptocurrency to be created by hard forking bitcoin’s blockchain. The SegWit implementation, in addition to the recovery of most major altcoins, brought the total cryptocurrency market capitalization to more than $155 billion, according to data from Coinmarketcap.
Most major altcoin markets began recovering again during the past few days. The price of Ethereum ETH, Monero XMR, DASH, Lisk LSK, STEEM, Litecoin LTC, Zcash ZEC, MaidSafeCoin Maid and Ethereum Classic ETC surged during the trading sessions of the past couple of days. Ethereum ETH surpassed the $330 mark, for the first time since late June. Monero XMR surged from around 0.022 BTC to 0.031 BTC earlier today, recording a rise of more than 41%. On the other hand, DASH price rose from $311 to $365 a couple of hours ago, accounting for a rise of around 18% in less than 24 hours.
It seems that the new uptrend affecting the altcoin markets will continue on building up, pushing the price of most major cryptocurrencies to higher levels. Most probably, Ethereum ETH, Monero XMR, DASH and STEEM will be amongst the biggest gainers during the last quarter of 2017.