Bitcoin Cash

Top Story

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was among the largest decliners in the latest market sell-off, with altcoins broadly under pressure as Bitcoin fell to a 17-day low. This outsized move for BCH highlights its sensitivity to broader market volatility and trader sentiment.

Other Highlights

• Recent price predictions indicated heightened volatility for BCH and other major cryptocurrencies, suggesting ongoing uncertainty.
• Daily crypto roundups noted BCH's price action amid sector-wide declines.
• Bitcoin stabilized after the overnight rout, but BCH continued to underperform relative to the broader market^[4].
• BCH's performance lagged behind the CD20 index, reflecting weaker relative strength.

Market Context

BCH fell 10.17% over the past 24 hours, significantly underperforming the CD20 index, which declined 1.01%. This underperformance aligns with headlines highlighting BCH as one of the hardest-hit altcoins in the wake of Bitcoin's drop. The broader market remains cautious following recent volatility and a brief stabilization in Bitcoin prices^[4].

What’s Next?

With BCH underperforming peers and volatility persisting across crypto markets, traders may look for signs of stabilization or further downside. Will BCH recover in line with the broader market, or will it continue to lag amid ongoing uncertainty?

BCH was officially launched in August 2017 and was distributed to bitcoin holders at a ratio of 1:1, meaning each bitcoin holder was entitled to receive one BCH token for each bitcoin they held.

Because Bitcoin Cash shared the same blockchain as Bitcoin until the hard fork (a major change to a network’s protocol), the two cryptocurrencies had similar characteristics. As with bitcoin, the total supply of BCH is capped at 21 million. However, they vary in major ways. For example, Bitcoin Cash can support 25,000 transactions per block, compared with Bitcoin’s 1,000 to 1,500 transactions per block.

In December 2017, BCH price hit an all-time high of $4,355.62, but it lost 80% of its value over the next six months as the wider crypto market experienced a prolonged bear market.

BCH prices remained under $600 for more than two years until January 2021 when a new bullish cycle began. The token for the forked bitcoin project managed to rise 410% to a peak of $1,636 in May 2021 – the highest price seen in about three years. By the end of June 2021, however, BCH’s price fell 75% to $40.

Bitcoin Cash users send and receive BCH on the blockchain by inputting the public-key information attached to each person’s digital wallet.

BCH uses the proof-of-work consensus, in which participants known as “miners” compete against each other using specialized computer equipment to be the first to discover new blocks.

Bitcoin Cash also uses the same SHA-256 hashing algorithm as Bitcoin – this essentially refers to the method of taking data and turning it into a digital fingerprint.

One of the things that makes Bitcoin Cash different from Bitcoin is its “difficulty adjustment” for block mining. In order to ensure that blocks are being mined consistently, the Bitcoin software adjusts the difficulty factor of mining for every 2,016 blocks mined. Bitcoin Cash instead adjusts its difficulty every 10 minutes to reflect the amount of computing power on the network.

Bitcoin Cash was born out of disagreements within the Bitcoin community over its ability to scale. When Satoshi Nakamoto developed the Bitcoin network, he limited Bitcoin’s block size to 1 megabyte to prevent people from spamming the network. In doing so, however, Nakamoto limited Bitcoin’s ability to scale.

To solve the scaling issue, developer Pieter Wuille proposed a solution known as segregated witness (SegWit). In short, SegWit is a process that increases the capacity of bitcoin blocks without changing their size limit by altering how the transaction data is stored. Members had differing views as to SegWit’s impact. Amid this back and forth, bitcoin developer Amaury Séchet decided to leave and create Bitcoin Cash along with American investor Roger Ver, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, crypto mining company Bitmain, and others.