Today, Bitcoin rose to a new record price of $5866 after easily passing the $5,000 mark on Thursday. Since then, the price has dropped to the $5,600 levels.
The rally is presumably connected to the upcoming SegWit2X and Bitcoin Gold hard forks. These forks could potentially generate blockchain splits, which is seen by a lot of investors as an opportunity to get "free coins" on both chains. The ongoing regulatory pressure on to altcoins and ICOs on countries like China and South Korea has also caused investors to look for safer alternatives within the cryptocurrency landscape. According to Bloomberg, the global demand for Bitcoin is shifting, with South Korea and Japan taking up most of the volume left recently by China, that used to account for the majority of trading volume.
At press time, the Bitcoin price is sitting at $5,866 and has risen 11.28% in the last 24 hours, with over $1.24 Bln worth of BTC exchanged on the BTC/USD pair, representing a 26% share of daily volume, second only to the JPY at 57%.
Currently sitting at $324.7, the Ethereum price has risen to 6.4% in the last 24 hours, with over $223M worth of Ethereum exchanged in the past 24 hours on the ETH/USD pair, which has a 29% share of daily trading volume.
