Amid market-wide speculation of a spot Bitcoin ETF on the horizon, driven by a flurry of new applications in the last week, the price action of one particular cryptocurrency has almost gone unnoticed.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH), born from a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain in 2017, surged to a one-year high of $305 on Thursday – a gain of 110% over the last seven days.
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According to crypto reporter Colin Wu, traders from South Korea likely played a major part in the asset’s uptick in price. Wu noted data from CoinMarketCap that showed South Korea’s largest crypto exchange Upbit recorded $350 million in trading volume for the BCH/Korean Won pair. This represented nearly 24% of the total global trading volume for BCH.
BCH contract open interest hit $562 million, the highest level since May 12, 2021. Since June 22, the trading volume of BCH contracts has almost increased by more than 10x compared to before, and the trading volume in the past 24h has reached as high as 4.427 billion. In the past… pic.twitter.com/M1IIY3RIw7
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) June 30, 2023
Wu also pointed to a tenfold increase in the volume of futures contracts for BCH since June 2022, with contract open interest now sitting at around $562 million.
Market intelligence firm Santiment attributed the asset’s swift price gain to the launch of EDX Markets, a crypto exchange backed by Wall Street giants Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, and Fidelity Digital Assets.
EDX, which launched last week, will let institutional investors invest exclusively in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. The market consensus behind EDX’s rationale in choosing these particular assets is that they are generally safer from being labelled securities by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that has been doling out enforcement actions to crypto firms alleging several popular cryptocurrencies are, in fact, securities.
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Still, out of the four assets listed by the new exchange, BCH has been the biggest beneficiary, noted analysts at Santiment.
At press time, BCH was trading at $295 with around $2 billion in daily trading volume.
