Motley Fool Australia » Investing » The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price is going nuts again

The crypto market has given back a few of its overnight gains and has retreated slightly during Asian afternoon trade.

This has left the entire value of the market priced at just over US$393 billion according to Coin Market Cap, compared to US$395 billion this morning.

But one cryptocurrency that has continued to push higher on Monday is Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

At the time of writing the Bitcoin (BTC) spin off is up a remarkable 14% over the last 24 hours to US$1,393 per token. This has lifted Bitcoin Cash’s market capitalisation to approximately US$22.1 billion.

Incredibly, this latest gain means that the Bitcoin Cash price has now doubled in value since the start of April.

Why is Bitcoin Cash on fire?

As I wrote last week, Bitcoin Cash was given a boost after the CEO of a digital currency investment firm declared the crypto bear market over and suggested that altcoins were ready for a comeback.

Brian Kelly from BKCM picked out Bitcoin Cash ahead of fellow altcoins Ripple (XRP), Litecoin (LTC), and EOS (EOS) as being the one to buy and sent its price soaring.

Since then there has been another development which has supported this move higher – Bitcoin ABC.

Bitcoin Cash, a spin-off itself, will soon have a spin-off of its own. On May 15 there will be a hard fork that creates Bitcoin ABC.

Bitcoin ABC has been designed to improve on Bitcoin Cash by quadrupling the block size from eight megabytes to 32 megabytes.

Developers believe that a larger block size will mean more transactions can be processed at once, resulting in a quicker network and boosting its appeal for real world use.

Time will tell whether this hard fork is a success, but there certainly is a lot of excitement in crypto circles.

But having said that, there was a lot of excitement initially about the Litecoin hard fork. But as some readers may be aware, Litecoin Cash has ultimately faded into obscurity along with Bitcoin Gold.