Investing.com – Bitcoin rose on Tuesday, as the digital currency attempted to renew its recent rally which saw prices surge above $7,500.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin rose to $7103.9, up $148.9, or 2.14% but remained shy of its all-time high of $7595. Bitcoin's market cap rose to 118.91 billion.
The rebound in bitcoin comes amid bullish sentiment on the popular digital currency as investors expect that an influx of institutional demand may extend bitcoin’s rally following the CME Group announcement last week that it plans to launch bitcoin futures in the fourth quarter.
Activity in bitcoin is expected to ramp up ahead of the upcoming split or fork of the underlying software supporting the bitcoin network. The next iteration of the Segregated Witness update – Segwit2x – is slated to activate in mid-November.
SegWit2x aims to speed up transactions on the bitcoin network by increasing the size of “blocks” - files that store information on the network - from one megabyte from two megabytes (hence, the 2x).
Bitcoin transactions are limited to 1-megabyte every 10 minutes - or seven transactions per second. This compares to 2,000 per second for Visa and means that at peak times bitcoin transactions can take hours to be fulfilled, inhibiting the currency.
Other cryptocurrencies followed bitcoin’s move higher, as bitcoin cash added 2.14% to $600.58 while bitcoin gold rose 1.58% to $153.02.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, fell 2.28% to $290.10.