Bitcoin Reached $11,800 in Price a Week After a Sudden Crash
Bitcoin (BTC) continues to recover from a sudden crash last Sunday. It is currently trading at $11,868, gaining 11.8%. Also, its 24-hour range is about $11,528 to $11,915.
So far, this has been a positive week for BTC. The world’s famous cryptocurrency continues to gain back from the Sunday price crash, appreciating 12% on a bullish run. And Bitcoin is still not showing any hint of slowing down any time soon.
A partner at quantitative trading firm ExoAlpha, Jean-Baptiste Pavageau, stated, “Bitcoin reached above $12,000 on August 2, but its ascension was stopped short.”
But then, he also said that the effect on BTC was short-lived. And a breakthrough over $12,500 on high volume would surely put Bitcoin on the way.
In addition to that, Pavageau believes that history might never happen again, but it rhymes most of the time. He explained, “If one looked at how the price of Bitcoin moved after the second halving in 2016, the path taken so far is highly similar.”
The similarity he is talking about is the sideways period of six to eight weeks post-halving. After that, there is a run-up and a correction before Bitcoin heads to all-time highs after several months.
ETC Price
Elsewhere, Ethereum Classic (ETC) has seen its hash rate fall after suffering two major blockchain reorganizations during the past week. With that, it exacerbates the risk of further 51% attacks aiming at the network.
As a result of the ETC’s miner capitulation, the estimated cost of executing a 51% attack targeting Ethereum Classic using has power rented from NiceHash has plummeted from $12,000 per hour to less than $4,000.
Even with that, the price remained unaffected by the apparent fragility of the network. And this is with ETC gaining over 2% over the dollar since the news of the second reorganization attack broker to recently trading at $7.21.
Furthermore, the 24-hour trade volume went up to about 10% from the level posted a few days before the first 51% attack. And this is with the orders continuing to execute across most top exchanges. They include Binance, Bitfinex, Coinbase Pro, KuCoin, and Okex.
The boost in trade activity happens despite the suspension of withdrawal, deposit, and margin funding services within some leading crypto exchanges.
Market Signals
The strength of the ETC market raises questions if whether algorithmic bots are driving most of the current trade activity despite exchanges having disabled wallet activity.
In 2019, the Blockchain Transparency Institute estimated that Ethereum Classic belongs to the top three most-watched traded crypto assets. It has over 80% of the volume that they flagged as suspicious.
Then, after lingering between five and six terahashes per second (TH/s) through July, the hash power of ETC declined to roughly four TH/s during the last seven days. This happened after news of the initial 51% attack broke.
Recently, a second attack saw hash power spike as high as 9 TH/s, before dropping to less than 2.5 TH/s.
Now, the hashing rate available for hire on NiceHash is equal to more than triple the power required to attack the network. Then, NiceHash’s power equated to 132% of the power needed to capture 51% of the hash rate of ETC.
Several mining pools have also disabled ETC payouts and encouraged miners to change to Ethereum (ETH) in response to the second attack.
