After a spot of weakness on cryptocurrency markets over the last few days the bulls appear to be back on Thursday.
In Asian afternoon trade the market has built on the strong gains that were made during U.S. trade and pushed higher to be worth US$436 billion according to Coin Market Cap.
While the Bitcoin (BTC) price has played a role in this with a solid 2% gain over the last 24 hours to US$9,235 per coin, its alt coin peers have done the majority of the heavy lifting.
At the time of writing the Ethereum (ETH) price is 3.7% higher, the Ripple (XRP) price has climbed 2.3%, the Cardano (ADA) price is up 5.5%, and the Litecoin (LTC) price is 3.4% higher.
But the biggest mover among the major coins by some distance has once again been the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price.
At present it is up 13.5% since this time yesterday to US$1,521.04 per token, lifting its market capitalisation to over US$26 billion.
This latest gain appears to be in response to news that UK-based crypto exchange London Block Exchange has added the alt coin to its platform. This could open Bitcoin Cash up to a wider audience and lend support to the buy side.
Incredibly, this means that BCH has now put on a gain of almost 130% in the space of a month.
Why is Bitcoin Cash up 130% in a month?
There have been a number of catalysts for this increase including improved trader sentiment in the alt coin space, the "burning" of coins, its addition to the new crypto exchange mentioned above, and an upcoming hard fork.
In respect to the latter catalyst, Bitcoin Cash, which itself is a spin-off from the original Bitcoin, is due to have a hard fork on May that will create its own spin-off by the name of Bitcoin ABC.
Bitcoin ABC has been designed to improve on Bitcoin Cash by quadrupling the block size from eight megabytes to 32 megabytes. Its developers believe that a larger block size will allow for more transactions to be processed at once, resulting in a quicker network and boosting its appeal for real world use. Eligible Bitcoin Cash holders will receive Bitcoin ABC coins in their wallets when it launches.
Things certainly do look rosy for Bitcoin Cash right now and I wouldn't be surprised to see it continue its ascent. But it is unquestionably a high risk asset with the potential for wild swings to both the upside and downside.
