BCH Roundup: Steady Development, Market Uptrends, and New Apps

The anniversary of the blockchain split that took place on August 1, 2017 is just two weeks away. Over the past few months Bitcoin Cash (BCH) infrastructure support and development has been exponential, while BCH proponents have also seen a bunch more announcements during the second week of July.

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The Bitcoin Cash Network Has Seen Massive Infrastructure Support and Steady Development Over the Last Year

A lot has changed since August 1, 2017, and in two weeks the Bitcoin Cash community will be celebrating the blockchain split. As of today, the BCH chain has seen over 60,000 blocks mined since the first hard fork, and since then the network has seen two more upgrades. The first upgrade changed the decentralized currency’s Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA), and the second fork upgraded the block size from 8 MB to 32 MB. Further, the BCH developers re-enabled a few Satoshi OP_Codes and increased the data carrier size which added a bunch of new features to the protocol.

The Fourth Largest Market Capitalization and the Fifth Highest Trade Volumes

Since the DAA was fixed, the BCH chain’s difficulty has been running perfectly and on July 15 the chain is operating at 12.69% of the bitcoin core’s (BTC) difficulty. Markets have done extremely well over the past year as well. BCH was averaging $300 per coin during its first week, now the token is worth $726 seeing a 142 percent increase. The digital asset commands a whopping $12.4Bn market valuation and with $320Mn traded over the past 24-hours, which puts BCH at the fifth position out of 1600+ other coins by trade volume. The top five BCH exchanges today include Coinex with $55Mn in volume, Okex with $40Mn, Binance – $33Mn, Hitbtc – $29Mn, and – Rightbtc -$24Mn. The top currencies swapped with BCH includes tether (USDT 48%) followed by bitcoin core (BTC 35%), USD (6.7%), ETH (3.7%), and KRW (2.4%). BCH markets are seeing some recovery since last week and are up 3 percent over the last 24-hours.

This Week’s Bitcoin Cash News and Developments

A lot has happened in within the BCH ecosystem this week. For instance, the highly anticipated privacy-centric BCH mixing platform Cash Shuffle has seen steady development and a stable release should be launched soon. The firm Robinhood added bitcoin cash support this week – adding another infrastructure provider to the massive list of apps that have implemented BCH. Bitcoin Cash supporters will be pleased to hear that Bitcoin XT has released its J version and OSX binaries are back. Furthermore, the developer Unwriter has launched another platform called Chaintrend.org. The app is a powerful OP_Return trend analytics engine with a simple JSON query language powered by bitdb.

In other news, we recently reported on a project called Bitreon that was supposed to be a Patreon-like application that uses bitcoin cash. Unfortunately, there were some discrepancies with the creator of the project and a particular donor. It seems the creator of Bitreon refuses to refund the donor’s funds and the Bitreon founder states that his platform will still launch in a couple of weeks. Even though he denies any wrongdoing the BCH community doesn’t seem too pleased with the situation and how he’s chosen to deal with the donor.

BCH Proponents Believe the Future Looks Bright

Besides the disappointing Bitreon rumors, there have been a lot of positive things happening across the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem overall, and BCH proponents are looking forward to the upcoming anniversary. On August 15, the community will likely find out what the next upgrade will feature as the November 15th hard fork software should be completed by then. Bitcoin ABC also plans to launch the finished stable 0.18 version of the ABC-client on October 15 – which will contain the necessary code changes for the hard fork. Bitcoin cashers have a lot to look forward to over the next few months and most of the decentralized currency’s supporters are pleased with the current direction.

What do you think about the latest events and announcements taking place within the Bitcoin Cash environment? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comment section below.

Images via Pixabay, Bitcointalk.org, Chaintrend, and Satoshi Pulse.

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