Bitcoin prices traded near all-time highs on a late Thursday night as prices hit a high of $2956 on Coinbase, less than $50 shy of its all-time high on June 11.
The remarkable rally comes during wider expectations of a positive outcome to the controversial and much-contested scaling debate that has been engulfing the bitcoin community. Bitcoin’s miners are now, more than ever, signaling their support for the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91, which would avoid a hard fork – a split of bitcoin into two blockchains.
“The recent stand-off between miners and network users over the future direction for Bitcoin has threatened in recent weeks to throw Bitcoin off course,” stated Matthew Newton, a market analyst at trading firm eToro. “Yet despite the stubbornness on both sides, it was ultimately in everyone’s interest to come to a resolution and strike a deal. Miners and users have now agreed on one method for creating the cryptocurrency and speeding up transactions.”
As the likely code update, BIP 91 is now locked in after having met the required signaling threshold at 80%. At the time of publishing, 95.1% of bitcoin’s hash power is now signaling for BIP 91, enabling miners to activate SegWit as a scaling solution, at least in the short-term.
All of which helped bitcoin price spur close to its all-time highs after falling to a low of below $1,900 over the weekend. The upswing has also seen a psychological impact on the wider cryptocurrency markets as the positive trend pushes the entire crypto market cap toward $100 billion.
Bitcoin prices have since pulled back closer to $2,750 on Friday afternoon (UTC). Still, bitcoin prices are up nearly 40% since Monday, when bitcoin was trading at a global average of just under $1,930. Altogether, bitcoin’s value gains since the turn of the year are at 275%.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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