The Bitcoin Cash Halvening happened today. BCH is a forked blockchain that split from Bitcoin in 2017 and implemented various changes to deal with the then-current issue of transaction oversaturation has experienced its halvening event, reducing mining rewards by half.

*Disclaimer: Author’s views are their own. Any predictions or opinions in this article are not financial advice, and should not be regarded as financial advice.

What is the halvening?

Bitcoin, and as a fork of BTC, Bitcoin Cash as well, have pre-programmed moments in which the miner rewards halve, eventually leading to a moment in time where no new cryptocurrency of that kind will be produced. This feature has been in Bitcoin from the very beginning and is a fundamental mechanism for managing the value of Bitcoin and Bitcoin forks. After all, if there were an infinite amount of BCH, they wouldn’t have any value.

Now, back to the Bitcoin Cash Halvening. From today onward until the next halvening which will happen on block height 840,000 (current block height is 630,001) instead of 12.5 BCH, miners will get 6.25 BCH for each completed block.

While this is going to cause the price of BCH to go up over the long run (due to more limited supply), in the short term, it’s going to cause some pressure for miners. Profitability has been cut in half and unless the price doubles soon, some miners will become unprofitable and stop mining BCH.

Overall, the price and mining activity on the BCH blockchain have been going down for the past few months. Recently, positive signs appeared in the expectation of the halvening. At the moment, it seems that both price and miner participation are on a slight upward trend, but the halvening is an event that induces volatility, so predictions cannot be made easily.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin Cash network receives 3.47 EH/s, and has a price of $265.4 USD, according to data gathered from Poolin.

Bitcoin Halvening coming soon

As mentioned in the beginning, the halvening is a feature that initially appeared in BTC. It is expected that in the next 36 days, Bitcoin will experience a halvening event as well. For comparison, the perceived value of BTC is a little bit more than 27 times.

We will update you on the BTC halving situation as the date approaches.