BTC opened up the week trading at around $7300, and experienced 24-hour trading volumes of over $2B. Things seemed to be progressing well for BTC as it reached $7500 on Wednesday, however, around this time, a number of stories began to circulate that the SegWit2x fork had been called off. The market responded almost immediately, and the price of Bitcoin fell to around $7200 as investors rushed to access their holdings. The volume of trades almost doubled on Wednesday as BTC generated over $4B worth of trading activity.

This continued on Thursday after Bitgo CEO Mike Belshe, posted an online letter confirming that the SegWit2x fork was off. A significant number of investors reacted to the announcement by choosing to exit their positions and BTC embarked on a steady decline that would continue over the rest of the week. It took until Friday for BTC to fall below $7000; however, from then on it began to fall away quickly.

As the weekend approached, BTC plummeted to around $6500 and experienced a 24-hour trading volume of $5B; it became clear that investors were determined to trade out of BTC in order to explore other options. Over the weekend, BTC fell as low as $5700, and lost almost 25% of its mid-week value, it also experienced a similar decrease in its market cap, which fell from around $128B to $93B. BTC has since recovered to trade at just over $6000, with a market cap of approximately $102B and an overall market dominance of 52%.

Wednesday’s shocking news caused the market to move in a number of different directions and this was reflected in the price action shown by the top altcoins. Ethereum has been the most stable, and despite fluctuating in price during the middle of the week, currently trades at close to the $300 price that it started the week with. Neo also experienced similar price fluctuations, and after trading at around $26, spiked at around $33 on Wednesday, as investors seemed to move back into altcoins, this was short lived and by the end of the week Neo had returned to trading at around $26.

The reason for the lack of a continued surge in altcoin prices has been the performance of Bitcoin Cash. Since the news broke, BCH has gone from trading at around $600 to breaking the $2000 mark and recording all time high prices.

BCH has grown exponentially, and experienced huge growth in just a few days. After reaching a peak price of just under $2500, BCH is currently trading at around $1700 and has increased its market cap to over $27B.