Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Turns 1: The History So Far

About a year ago, on August 1, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was launched. It surely seems like a lifetime ago, as the crypto market is fast and changes all the time, so it can be pretty weird to think that Bitcoin Cash only exists for about a year. It seems that the token has been around for so much longer than that.

As a way to commemorate Bitcoin Cash turning 1, we will analyse its brief history in the market.

A Brief History of BCH

Bitcoin Cash derives from the original Bitcoin. The token was born from a hard fork that was created to increase the Bitcoin block size limit and change its code. All began when a group of developers decided to upgrade the original Bitcoin more than a year ago.

A code change, also known as hard fork, was implemented and the block 478,558 of the original Bitcoin was separated and anyone would receive a BCH in a one to one ratio with their current BTC.

At the moment of its launch, the value of the BCH was about $555 USD, much lower than the original Bitcoin. The price would soon reach its peak during early January when its price hit $4,000 USD per token. The spike in prices suddenly generated investigations of insider trading at exchanges but no proof of foul play was ever found.

At the current moment, BCH is valued at $792 USD and it ranks 4th in the market capitalization. BCH would be faster than the original BTC because of its block size and, because of this, better for transactions. Most believed that Bitcoin Cash would be really digital cash and most of them still do.

According to Alejandro de la Torre, the VP of Business Operations at BTC.com, BCH virtually eliminated the risk for network congestion by increasing the block size to 32MB, which caused the new token to be highly scalable when compared to the original Bitcoin and has paved the way for transactions that could be considerably cheaper.

This was made with the belief that Bitcoin Cash could really be the answer for Bitcoin’s original goal of becoming digital cash. In fact, countries with high inflation like Venezuela, cited by de la Torre, could use this token as a way to make transactions when the national currency is basically losing all its value due to a high inflation of more than 40,000%.

Alejandro de La Torre has also commented that Bitcoin Cash has an engaged community and already has on-chain apps like Memo and Wormhole and many more are still to come. According to him, these community-driven networks are important for the adoption of the token.

One year after its creation, the Bitcoin Cash has expanded to 19 different services across the blockchain market and is tradable on 41 exchanges. While less than the original Bitcoin, the numbers are still impressive when you consider that BCH only exists for a year.

About BTC.com

BTC.com is one of the major Bitcoin-related companies in the world. It has more than a million users and 25% of the Bitcoin mining is done there. Since 2015, the company has processed more than $5 billion worth of BTC and BCH.

The company has supported Bitcoin Cash since its inception and has released and delivered wallets and features that are compatible with Bitcoin Cash.