There have been some very interesting developments on the crypto market as of late. On the 15th of October, bitcoin’s price rose to 5,950 USD on the Bitfinex exchange, which brought the currency’s market cap up to just shy of 100bn USD (according to coinmarketcap). This marks a new all-time high for bitcoin and is 24% higher than the record set on the 2nd of September when the flagship digital currency’s market cap was at 81bn USD.

Despite the recent surge, the total market cap of all publically traded cryptocurrencies didn’t manage to beat its all-time high set on the 2nd of September at 179.45bn USD, falling just shy at 176.72bn USD on the 15th of October:

While market cap analysis is a fairly relative thing, the current data does tell us that there is currently no net inflow of new money into the crypto market. Consequently, it turns out that many investors have sold their altcoins and switched to bitcoins. They’ve most likely done this in anticipation of a possible SegWit2x hardfork scheduled to take place in November, after which it’s possible that bitcoin owners will have access to a new unit of cryptocurrency. In my view, the current growth being witnessed by bitcoin in the absence of any new money on the cryptocurrency market casts some doubts over the stability of this growth. At the time of writing, BTC is trading at around the 5,697 USD mark.