Investing.com – Bitcoin rebounded sharply on Monday, a day after it fell to a nearly two-month low following the suspension of the SegWit2x software upgrade that would have led to split in bitcoin.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin rose to $6,209.2, up $402.7, or 6.94% well below its recent high of $7895. Bitcoin's market cap was $104 billion.
Bitcoin slumped to a nearly two-month low of $5,427 on Sunday as investors appeared to lose faith in the popular digital currency after a software upgrade called SegWit2x, aimed to speeding up transactions on the bitcoin network was cancelled.
Developers behind the SegWit2x upgrade announced last Wednesday that they were suspending plans for the upgrade, which was slated to activate this week.
The plan to cancel the upgrade left many questioning the future of bitcoin as the Segwit2x upgrade was aimed at speeding up transactions on the bitcoin network by increasing the size of “blocks” - files that store information on the network - from one megabyte to two megabytes (hence, the 2x).
With bitcoin’s block size set to remain limited to 1-megabyte – roughly seven transactions per second – many investors appeared to pile into Bitcoin cash, betting that the bitcoin offshoot was more likely to be adopted as mainstream form of payments as it boasts both cheaper transactions costs and faster transaction processing times compared to bitcoin.
Bitcoin cash rallied before to an all-high of $2,790 on Sunday before pairing gains to trade at $1330, down 2.21% while bitcoin gold rose 0.91% to $255.54.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, rose 3.23% to $313.00.