Bitcoin Cash ABC is a fork of Bitcoin Cash that introduced many changes to the core protocol, along with an increased block size to allow for more transactions. In this article, we will calculate how many transactions per second Bitcoin Cash ABC (Adjustable Blocksize Cap) can handle.

This is the updated version of an older article. If you’d like to know how many transactions per second BCH could handle before its fork, check here.

How many transactions can Bitcoin Cash handle?

To find the amount of tx/s BCH can handle, we need to understand how Bitcoin Cash processes transactions.

How it works

Whenever a user wants to send coins, his wallet creates a transaction containing his transfer. This transaction gets broadcasted to all Bitcoin Cash Nodes, who will then store this transaction in their mempool. The mempool is a “waiting area” where the transaction gets stored until it gets added to the next available block. In the BCH network, a block gets created roughly every 10 minutes and can contain up to 32 MB worth of transactions. Once a block with the user’s transaction in it gets created, the transaction gets confirmed.

Calculations

To calculate the transactions per second we need the following information:

Block Time: 10 Minutes = 600 seconds

Block Size: 32 MB = 33554432 Bytes

33554432 Bytes / 600 s = 55924.05 Bytes/s

Using this calculation we now know that the Bitcoin Cash Network (on average) can process 55924.05 Bytes worth of transactions per second.



How many transactions are this?

Now that we know the amount of data that could be added to a block per second, we just need the average transaction size to be able to convert this into transactions per second.

We calculated the average transaction size by analyzing 100 BCH blocks and divided their block size by the number of transactions, which gave me the average transaction size.

Average BCH transaction size: 481.62 Bytes

Note: While a simple “standard” transaction is only 226 Bytes, there are also bigger transactions being sent, which take up way more space. These big transactions, which increase the average transaction size, usually originate from exchanges or wallet services such as Coinbase.

Conclusion

We divide the amount of data that can be processed per second by the average transaction size, which gives us the transactions per second.

55924.05 Bytes/s / 481.62 = 116 tx/s

On average, Bitcoin Cash can handle up to 116 transactions per second.

However, this number is misleading – the important part is the “on average”. BCH only confirms the pending transactions every 10 minutes. Therefore, it would be better to say that on average Bitcoin Cash ABC can confirm 69670 transactions per 10 minutes.

As stated above, BCH solves its scalability problem by increasing its blocksize, which introduces new problems.

If you’re interested in the problems of Bitcoin Cash, we recommend you check out this article: The Bitcoin Cash problem