Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Data Report for the 4th Year | Joint release by Bitdeer and BTC.com
As the most successful Bitcoin branch, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been thriving for 4 years. For the period of August 1st, 2020 to August 1st, 2021, we will provide a detailed analysis of the events and noteworthy data.
- This report is written and published by Bitdeer, data supported by BTC.com.
Technology Development
According to the data from the Coin Dance website, BCH has currently completed 35 development tasks, 14 of which are under development, and 23 are still under discussion.
BCH has undergone two technical upgrades in the past year, one in November 2020 and the other in May 2021. BCH made changes at the base level in these two technical upgrades and made improvements at the non-consensus level.
- Change of Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm DAA to ASSERT DAA (aserti3–2d)
BCH changed the original difficulty adjustment algorithm to the ASSERT DAA difficulty adjustment algorithm on November 15 2020. This difficulty adjustment algorithm keeps the block time stable and minimizes the power oscillation between other SHA-256 chains. The introduction of the ASSERT algorithm eliminates the periodical fluctuations in difficulty and hashing power, narrows the profit differences between honest miners and vaults and keeps the average BCH block generation interval at 10 minutes which makes for an average transaction confirmation time of 10 minutes.
2. Removed the transaction chain restrictions on unconfirmed transactions
This is a change that has been requested and long-awaited by many companies, whose use cases involve lots of chained zero-confirmation transactions. Previously users were limited to 50 unconfirmed chained transactions and once the limit was reached users were unable to broadcast new transactions involving the same UTXOs until a block was mined. That limit is now gone entirely.
3. Enable multiple OP_RETURNs
The effect of OP_RETURN on the BCH network is already apparent. It is precisely OP_RETURN enabled on the BCH network that allows SLP applications to flourish. This change allows for multiple OP_RETURNs which brings more functions of OP_RETURN to the BCH chain and does not change the BCH consensus layer. This change helps those who create token applications to build new application scenarios to BCH, such as a new auction protocol, combining SLP transactions with other SLP-based protocols, etc.
4. Double-Spend Proofs
Double-spend proofs enable nodes to better detect a double-spend attempt. The introduction of this function will enhance the security of zero confirmation transactions, strengthen the protection of those receiving payments in BCH, making Bitcoin Cash even safer than it already was for retail and online stores. This gives greater confidence in the network and encourages more to adopt BCH as a payment system.4.Double-Spend Proofs
5. CHIP (Cash Improvement Proposal)
One of the most criticized aspects of BCH hard fork upgrades is that the content to be included in hard forks requires compulsory upgrades for all node software and node operators. To solve this specific problem, the node development community introduced the concept of CHIP.
CHIP (Cash Improvement Proposal) is a standardized proposal that seeks to modify or improve certain aspects of BCH. These CHIPs must first be submitted to the community for reference by full-node client programmers. After discussion, they will reach a final consensus on these proposals: whether to add to the changes or reject to make any major changes. So far, most of the CHIPs offered are on https://bitcoincashresearch.org/, and everyone is free to review and comment on this information. The existence of CHIP gives each proposal more time for discussion and experimentation, while attracting more stakeholders to participate in the testing and discussion within the BCH community, thereby making the upgrade of BCH more meaningful and in line with users and the market. Developers are no longer dictatorial in the area of development.
Data Analysis
In the data analysis section, we sampled data for two cycles. The data sampling period of the previous year is 2019.08.01–2020.07.31 (UTC). This year’s data sampling time period is 2020.08.01 -2021.07.28 (UTC).
According to the data provided by BTC.com, the BCH hashrate has fluctuated sharply this year. The highest daily computing power of the entire network is 5.38EH/s, the lowest is 762.80PH/s, and the annual average daily hashrate is 2.08EH. /s. It can be seen from the hashrate date on the bitinfocharts website that the BCH hashrate was stable in the second half of 2020. In the first half of 2021, it was fluctuating sharply and gradually increasing. In the second half of 2021, due to the impact of regulatory policies, it began to decline.
The major miners which make up the Bitcoin Cash hashrate include AntPool, BTC.TOP, ViaBTC, BTC.com pool. In total, 11 mining pools support BCH mining of which 29.52% is anonymous hashing power.
With the support of these pools, 324,693.75 BCH were mined this year:
According to hashrate purchasing data from Bitdeer, 8.71% of the SHA256 orders for this year chose BCH mining and 68.5% of the mining pools chose BTC.com.
Another noteworthy observation is that the BCH mining difficulty reached its peak twice during this cycle. The highest value reached was 657.15G, which is nearly 4 times greater than the lowest point of 172.1G. The mining difficulty adjustment in BCH is tied to the hashrate of BCH. When the hashrate drops, in order to ensure stable block times, the mining difficulty decreases. At present, the difficulty of BCH mining has dropped to a relatively low level.
The maximum volume of the BCH block this year is 7.62MB, which is 30% less than the previous year’s figure. The average block size of BCH is 370.32KB, while it was only 110.36KB last year. The key reason for the growth of BCH block volume is the rapid growth of transaction volume on the chain. The average block transaction number of BCH during the last year was only 280.7, reaching 886.9 this year.
Note:
Last year: 2019.08.01.01–2020.07.31(UTC)
This year: 2020.08.01–2021.07.28(UTC)
According to the data from the bitinfocharts, the on-chain transaction volume of BCH is increasing. The daily transaction volume has grown from a high of 20,000 to more than 350,000 transactions per day. In February of this year, the transaction volume on the BCH network surpassed BTC. Although it has fallen recently, it is still relatively high, with a daily transaction volume of around 90,000.
Although the BCH transaction volume is increasing, BCH’s transaction fees remained at a low level. As seen in the figure below, the average daily transaction cost for BCH was 0.068USD. This is consistent with the Bitcoin Cash philosophy of maintaining low fees while enabling high transaction volumes.
By analyzing data on BCH block production, we defined three intervals to judge the effect of the ASSERT DAA difficulty adjustment algorithm. The first block generation interval is greater than or equal to 30 minutes and less than 60 minutes, the second block interval is greater than 60 minutes and the third block generation interval is less than 30 minutes.
During the last year, BCH had 962 blocks with generation intervals around 60 minutes or even more, and 3,409 block generation intervals were between 30–60 minutes.
This year is 2020.08.01–2021.07.28 (UTC)
Comparing this to data from the current year, we found that from August 1 2020 to July 28 2021 BCH still had 535 blocks with a generation interval of 60 minutes or more and 3028 blocks with a generation interval between 30–60 minutes. Compared to the previous year, the stability of block production has indeed improved.
But here is an interesting phenomenon. There are 13 days of this year that the number of blocks produced in 24 hours is less than or equal to 100, indicating this: The average block interval of 13 days will be slightly longer than other times. But only once in the last year, the number of blocks produced in 24 hours is less than 100, which occurred on April 9, 2020, only 55 blocks were mined on that day.
Merchant Adoption
In the area of merchant adoption, BCH has continued to grow. According to map.bitcoin.com, nearly 10,000 physical merchants accept BCH payments globally. A year ago, only 2000–3000 companies accepted BCH payments according to the same database.
Over the past year, many well-known businesses in different industries added support for BCH payments. These include online marketplace E-kasuwan Gwari; luxury retailer Jomashop; automobile auction giant Mecum Auctions; Cruise Travel Outlet, one of the largest cruise companies in the United States; Dream PC, an Australian custom gaming computer manufacturer, one of the largest boutique wine auction houses in the world; Acker, the oldest wine merchant in the United States, Venezuelan taxi company; Canadian mortgage broker Company Matrix Mortgage Global, private jet charter operator flyExclusive, Florida-based luxury hotel group Kessler Collection, etc.
Recently, more than 100 companies in Argentina began accepting BCH as payment after a focused adoption effort. Looking at Bitpay, a payment processor widely used by online merchants, BCH has become the cryptocurrency with the second-largest transactional volume. This growth proves Bitcoin Cash’s great utility as a payment system with low fees, fast transaction confirmation, and high security.
Smart Contracts and Defi
BCH has also been exploring the field of smart contracts and Defi.
The most well-known smart contract protocol for BCH is SLP and it has achieved some impressive results in the last few years. The BCH community has launched a number of services based on SLP, such as the BCH and SLP token exchange 1BCH.com and decentralized exchange SLPswap.
In terms of Defi, the AnyHedge protocol was launched at the beginning of 2021. AnyHedge is a decentralized hedging solution for any asset on the BCH network, a decentralized protocol used to build an open financial system. AnyHedge can also be regarded as an open-source derivative tool, which can be embedded in exchanges and over-the-counter trading desks. Among them, the decentralized trading platform Detoken has implemented the AnyHedge protocol. According to @General Protocol from Twitter, as of May 3, 2021, the total historical value (THVL) locked by AnyHedge reached 10.4 million U.S. dollars, and the total value currently locked(TVL) was $158,000.
Dr. Wang Kui and his team developed the BCH side-chain project SmartBCH, which is compatible with Ethereum EVM and Web3, to bring the smart contract and Defi technology to BCH. According to current tests, the underlying storage engine of SmartBCH can support more than 600 times the throughput of Ethereum. SmartBCH was officially launched on July 31, and we look forward to seeing its great impact on the Bitcoin Cash network.
NFT’s
In the thriving NFT field, BCH is not lagging behind. Enter The Sphere, an NFT project for collecting RPG card games based on SLP NFT technology has been launched on the BCH mainnet. Each item in the game has a corresponding NFT token and this token is part of the Bitcoin Cash SLP protocol.
One.Surgery, a non-profit organization, combined its global surgical projects with BCH technology and is committed to innovating, breaking barriers, and international surgical operations. They released a unique and meaningful NFT series on the BCH blockchain — a beautiful, time-limited animated NFT collection. This collection represents voices from all over the world who want to improve the safety of surgical procedures.
In addition to these projects, BCH non-custodial wallet Signup.cash provides functions such as SLP tokens and NFTs. Users can automatically create or destroy NFTs on BCH through their Fungal Spore Exploder.
Applications
One of the most important aspects of BCH is its applications. One such application is Noise.Cash, which has massively grown the on-chain transaction volume of BCH. Noise.Cash is equivalent to Twitter in the BCH ecosystem and you can get BCH airdrops just by posting. Noise.Cash currently has 201,000 users, making it one of the fastest-growing websites on the Internet. Its associated blog posting website, Read.Cash, currently has 69,000 users. Through such websites, BCH has grown its audience and incentivized ordinary users to adopt it as a payment system.
Another popular application is Tipb.ch. Users only need to bind their BCH wallet address and then post on Twitter with the #bitcoincash hashtag to send/receive tips. Users can also receive BCH airdrops.
Trading
As an investment tool, BCH, like any other cryptocurrency, fluctuates in price. According to Coinmarketcap’s data, the price of BCH was relatively stable in the second half of 2020, where it mostly stayed in the area of US$250. In the first half of 2021, BCH began to rise and by May 11 this year it set a multi-year high of US$1542.43. Recently, however, the price of BCH has returned to around US$500.
BCH has doubled nearly 7 times from the lowest price to the highest price in the past year. However, from the perspective of cryptocurrency as a whole, the increase of BCH has not satisfied investors. Compared to other coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin, which all made new all-time highs, Bitcoin Cash only reached half of its previous all-time high. At present the market ranking of BCH has fallen from the top five to the top ten cryptocurrencies, temporarily ranking twelfth overall.
BCH is still a mainstream cryptocurrency and the number of institutions that support BCH transactions continues to rise. Luno, the first exchange to receive the Securities Commission of Malaysia, added BCH transactions. Equos, a cryptocurrency trading under the blockchain financial services company Diginex, added BCH trading pairs, and broker Trade Republic launched BCH transactions, the world’s largest P2P trading platform Localbitcoins, BCH transactions have also been added. BCH is even supported by Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital asset manager, and Grayscale also launched the trust fund BCHG. JP Morgan also allows financial institutions to buy and sell approved cryptocurrency funds, including BCH trusts. The leading US media CNBC added a new BCH price information column on the website homepage.
In early 2021, the derivatives exchange Bit.com launched BCH options, and the 24-hour trading volume exceeded expectations. At the same time, the crypto bank Matrixport, co-founded by the chairman of Bitdeer Group Wu Jihan and Ge Yuesheng, successively added support for BCH wealth management products this year.
Community Dynamics
In terms of publicity, the BCH community launched whybitcoincash.com to explain why BCH is superior to BTC. The community also spawned popular initiatives that include Bitcoincash Nigeria and “Satoshi Hongyuan, Bitcoin Cash” jointly produced by Satoshi’s Angels and Matrixport. This Week in Bitcoin Cash publishes important news covering BCH development, user adoption, mining, news, upcoming videos, events, conferences, new BCH-related products and tools, competitions, donations, etc., in the form of graphics and text. Satoshi’s Angels also publishes the BCH weekly report every week. BCH talk-show The Bitcoin Cash Podcast even introduced pay-per-view for some of their content. Users pay 0.0019BCH to listen to an episode.
In terms of funding, the existence of the crowdfunding tool Flipstarter has given the BCH community a much-needed monetary boost. The BCH development teams and many projects in the community have raised funds through Flipstarter. At present, 72 projects have raised 8,854 BCH on Flipstarter. It has allowed many BCH supporters to join in on BCH construction and development projects. Secondly, Roger Ver has claimed to have invested US$2 billion in BCH to support BCH infrastructure and promote BCH as a currency worldwide.
This article was written by the market team of Bitdeer Group, supported by data from BTC.com. The above content has collected and sorted BCH-related articles, news, data, and other materials from August 1, 2020, to July 28, 2021. Please inform us if you have any suggestions.
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