Cryptocurrencies market have continued on their good run during trade on Thursday, with the bitcoin (BTC) price performance a particular highlight.
At the time of writing the bitcoin price is up 10.5% since this time yesterday at US$9,657.04 per token according to Coin Market Cap.
This latest gain means that bitcoin's market capitalisation has now increased to just under US$163 billion and has helped push the value of the entire cryptocurrency market up to US$467.4 billion.
Other cryptocurrencies making notably strong gains today have been ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), litecoin (LTC), and Stellar Lumens (XLM). These four cryptos have made gains of no less than 9% over the last 24 hours.
Litecoin continues to be the stand out performer on the market with an incredible 31% increase to US$231.94. This has been driven largely by its plans to fork into two cryptocurrencies next week.
Holders of Litecoin at the time of the hard fork will receive 10 Litecoin Cash tokens for every Litecoin they hold. Like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) before it, Litecoin Cash has been designed to improve on the underlying technology of its parent coin in order to speed up its processing times and lower its transaction costs.
Why is the rest of the market pushing higher?
The rest of the market has continued to climb higher today thanks to reports that South Korean officials are not going to crack down as hard on the cryptocurrency market as first feared. According to CNBC, officials are widely expected to take a toned down approach to regulation changes, which is similar to the stance that U.S. officials have hinted at taking.
All in all, this appears to have led to a further improvement in trader sentiment. So much so, I would not be at all surprised to see bitcoin break though the US$10,000 mark once again later this week.
But I won't be investing myself. We have seen time and time again how sentiment can shift in the blink of an eye, which makes this an extremely high risk investment proposition.
