With the Bitcoin price on the retrace, it is only normal that alternative cryptocurrencies would be experiencing similar struggles right now. All top 10 currencies are presently in the red, a situation that may not change all that quickly. The biggest losses have been seen in Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Ethereum Classic. In particular, the Bitcoin Cash losses come as a big surprise to most holders after this week’s earlier price increase.

Bitcoin Cash Price Takes a Major Beating

Every time the Bitcoin price goes down, alternative currencies will suffer a similar fate. That doesn’t mean all currencies will drop in value by similar amounts, though. While Bitcoin is down 6% at the time of writing, its counterpart Bitcoin Cash is far worse off. More specifically, the altcoin has lost nearly 13% of its value in the past 24 hours. With so much panic across all markets, that is not really surprising by any means.

For holders of Bitcoin Cash

, the sharp retrace will come as a small surprise, though. Earlier this week, the Bitcoin “clone” started showing some positive momentum for the first time in about a full week. That momentum was rather short-lived, unfortunately, thanks to recent news from China spooking the markets once again. This marks two weekends in a row that Chinese officials have disrupted cryptocurrency markets, and it will probably not be the last time either.

Due to the value decline, the Bitcoin Cash price now hovers near the US$550 mark. That is still a fair value for a currency that didn’t even exist two months ago. Earlier this week, the value was on target to surpass US$700, but it fell just short in the end. Ever since that time, the BCH price retraced ever so slightly, before eventually dropping significantly less than 24 hours ago. All markets have to recover from this recent shakeup, but some will always sustain bigger losses compared to others.

Bitcoin Cash still has a nice amount of trading volume over the past 24 hours, which will play to its advantage. Although some people will argue a US$600 million volume isn’t all that great compared to some other currencies, it is still rather high compared to a few days ago. Right now, it appears people are more interested in selling than buying, though, which may hint at it taking some time until BCH recovers.

Bithumb is leading the list of exchanges ranked by volume. No surprise there, as the South Korean exchange is driving the volume for virtually all currencies it supports right now. Huobi and OKCoin complete the top three, which is pretty interesting. Similarly to Bitcoin, both of those companies trade Bitcoin Cash a lot lower than the rest of the world. This trend also encompasses ViaBTC, Jubi, CNCX, and Yunbi. The latter exchange is trading at US$160 below the global market average right now.

All things considered, the Bitcoin Cash price losses are not a big surprise by any means. Given the current Bitcoin price trend, altcoins will suffer from a similar downtrend too. However, it’s never good to see an alternative version of Bitcoin lose more value than Bitcoin itself when the market is spooked. This shows altcoins are best considered speculative assets first and foremost. That situation may not be changing anytime soon, regardless of the value said coins may boast at any given time.