Investing.com – Bitcoin traded lower on Wednesday, as investors appeared to take profit from the digital currency’s recent rally which saw it surged above $4,600 for the first time in its nine-year history.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin fell to $4,581.9, down $26.3 or 0.57%, just shy of its recent all-time high of $4,583.8.
Following its recent rally, Bitcoin is set to close more than 70% higher in August, boosting its market cap to $75.63 billion, highlighting the elevated demand for the largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Over the past year, Bitcoin has surged more than 400%, easily outperforming US stock benchmarks such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.
In other crypto-currency trade, Bitcoin Cash rose $30.69, or 5.80%, to $565, but remained well below its peak of $935.50 while Ethereum, added 3.44% to $385.78.
Bitcoin Cash was created as a result of a ‘civil war’ in Bitcoin, after some members of the bitcoin community rejected software upgrade SegWit2x – a proposal adopted by the majority of bitcoin users aimed at speeding up transactions on the bitcoin network – following concerns that SegWit2x fails to adequately address bitcoin’s scaling problem.
Bitcoin transactions are limited to 1-megabyte every 10 minutes - or seven transactions per second. This compares to 2,000 per second for Visa and means that at peak times bitcoin transactions can take hours to be fulfilled, inhibiting the currency.
Bitcoin Cash seeks to increase the block size to 8-megabytes whereas SegWit2X proposes moving transaction data outside of the block on a parallel track with plans to increase bitcoin’s block size later this year.
To stay on top of the latest moves in the crypto-space, be sure to check out: https://www.investing.com/crypto/