Investing.com – Bitcoin fell on Monday, as recent optimism over the CME Group announcement last week that it plans to launch bitcoin futures in the fourth quarter failed stem losses.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin fell to $6997.7, down $384.3, or 5.21% after hitting an all-time high of $7595. The dip in bitcoin saw its market cap fall to $118 billion.
Bitcoin struggled to continue its six-day streak of record highs, as traders mulled over the upcoming split or fork of the underlying software supporting the bitcoin network. The next iteration of the Segregated Witness update – Segwit2x – is slated to activate over the next two weeks.
SegWit2x aims to speed up transactions on the bitcoin network by increasing the size of “blocks” - files that store information on the network - from one megabyte from two megabytes (hence, the 2x).
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.
Other cryptocurrencies followed bitcoin’s move lower, as bitcoin cash fell 4.50% to $597.34 while bitcoin gold slumped 10.96% to $146.40.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, rose 1.09% to $299.12.