A Week After The Pump, Bitcoin SV Maintains High Valuation

Last week’s price movements of Bitcoin SV caught many by surprise, after the controversial fork’s valuation skyrocketed from $170 per coin to upwards of $400, before stabilising at around $350.

Since the community perception of the cryptocurrency is not becoming any less divisive, there are usually two groups of polar opinions about the reasons for the pump.

On one hand, there are the people frustrated with Craig Wright’s claims about being Satoshi, and his long history of not being perfectly sincere, to put it mildly. From BTC maximalists, to Bitcoin Cash proponents and Ethereum community figures, the consensus surrounding the event was that the price hike was fully artificial.

And indeed it coincided with the announcement that the “mysterious” bonded courier has finally arrived. For the unaware, Craig Wright has previously claimed in court that he is temporarily unable to access his fortune worth over a million BTC and BCH – until the scheduled arrival of a bonded courier. Once it was publicly announced that the courier had arrived, the price of the cryptocurrency began to skyrocket.

In a rather disappointing turn of events, however, Craig Wright’s lawyer admitted that Craig and nChain still don’t have possession of the keys, and the “courier” only provided a list of public addresses – one that could be extracted by practically anyone with access to the bitcoin blockchain.

The anticlimactic end of this story is sure to be added to the long list of unsuccessful attempts by Wright to prove that he is Satoshi – a claim that is rather simple to prove if true. This further fuelled scam accusations, with some popular crypto influencers outright suggesting that getting BSV delisted from high-volume exchanges was a deliberate act which made artificial pumps much cheaper to achieve. Images suggesting wash trading became viral all over social media, and former big block ally Roger Ver also theorised that the bonded courier claims had a lot of Chinese traders “fooled”.

On the other hand, BSV proponents had a lot to celebrate during the week, as some services built on top of its blockchain have started to get traction.

Social Media app Twetch has managed to attract many popular figures while still in beta – namely Hollywood actor Eli Roth, UFC fighter Jon Fitch, as well as some controversial ones such as youtuber Stefan Molyneux and writer Mike Cernovich.

In the case of Molyneux and Cernovich, being banned from traditional social media is a very real possibility, which could introduce the novel blockchain-backed website to their hundreds of thousands of loyal followers. Molyneux has also started using BSV-powered service Streamanity instead of YouTube for some of his live streams.

So looking away from Craig Wright there is undoubtedly a lot going on in the BSV ecosystem – and if the trend of attracting popular social media influencers continues, there is a chance that the controversial cryptocurrency will be legitimised in the eyes of the wider community.