Bitcoin Cash transactions have seen a significant spike, rising from about 10,000 a day to 40,000 on Thursday, making that one of the highest level of demand for the network.

The spike was met with a slight increase in days destroyed, a measure that tries to remove noise to see real activity.

This is the highest number of transactions since September if we ignore stress tests and a spike during the split fork in November.

Whether they are real transactions or not, is difficult to discern. One measure suggests there has been an increase in very small payments:

Median is not the most common number, but the middle number between a set of values. So in 1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, the median is 6 as it has three numbers lower and three numbers higher.

According to this measure, the median transaction value for eth is precisely $0, which obviously does not make sense.

So while this might suggest there’s low value activity, other data gives a very different picture:

According to the above, Bitcoin Cash moved close to half a billion in value, more than eth’s $300 million and a rise by above 50% for BCH.

The average transaction is also significantly higher than eth at $12,500, about half that of bitcoin.

Bitcoin, of course, is very much king, transferring $7.6 billion in the past 24 hours. The network is the oldest, best known, and the most integrated in all services that enable cryptos.

According to this measure for BCH, there’s been a real rise in activity. One can speculate it might be Venezuela, or perhaps some other local, or maybe a slight rise in fees for BTC and even ETH has perhaps sent some activity to BCH.

ETH fees are almost non existent for westerners. They have risen to about 1.2 cent, which is pretty much nothing.

In very poor countries, however, 1 cent might be what to us is $10 dollars or more, so that might be one reason.

Another reason may of course be this slight increase in days destroyed. Someone might have perhaps moved some relatively dormant coins, with the most probable reason being that Bitcoin Cash has turned sort of bullish, so transaction levels have risen.

Bitcoin Cash has risen from a low of $80 reached this December to $120 at the beginning of this month. Then it rose another 40% or so to a recent high of circa $170, now trading at $156.

It has overtaken eth in price, but remains below litecoin in market cap and even below EOS.

Litecoin had a halving recently which turned it somewhat bullish. BCH’s halving is early next year, but they have an upgrade this May which implements Schnorr Signatures.

That they’re doing so before Bitcoin Core is a bit surprising because btc devs have been talking about Schnorr Signatures since forever, yet it is still unclear when bitcoin will implement them.

The suggestions are that BTC’s focus on backwards compatibility through soft-forks makes such upgrades complex and time consuming to develop, while BCH’s use of hardforks makes it a bit simpler and easier.

The end result is that BCH is showing they do actually have skilled devs. That might make it interesting to see how this will continue to develop, just as it will be interesting to see if this transactions rise is a fluke, or a trend.

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