Scalability is often mentioned as one of the most significant obstacles, hindering the mass adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network has vowed to prove the doubters wrong, with a community-initiated stress test on the BCH mainnet and its services. According to Blocktivity data, the test resulted in approximately 2.3 million transactions in 24 hours, which is the third-largest daily transactions number, behind only Steemit (2.55 million) and EOS (10 million).

The Biggest Community Driven Stress Test Of Any Blockchain So far $BCH has processed 1,265,876 transactions in the past 24 hrs BMG Pool just mined a 10 MB / 44,705 transaction blockhttps://t.co/G135pUEmUHhttps://t.co/CLYp8rjbJdhttps://t.co/V5ver1Eaa6https://t.co/U1nlqzntSp pic.twitter.com/6Y2hND3YNg — Bitcoin SV (@_BitcoinSV) September 1, 2018

The stress test website states that millions of minimum fee transactions, “will prove to merchants and businesses worldwide and also to ourselves that the BCH main network is capable of scaling on chain and is capable of handling such volume of transactions today.“ The BCH development team initially aimed to process over 5 million minimum fee transactions but even though they fell short of the original target, it might yet be reached next year as the team was hopeful they can make it an annual event.

According to BitInfoCharts data at the time, BCH was responsible for 63 percent of all crypto transactions throughout the duration of the test. However, this was disputed by Dan Larimer, CTO of EOS, the fifth-largest virtual currency. Mr. Larimer claimed that despite millions of spam BCH transactions, EOS still accounted for nearly a half of total operations.

The stress test averaged 14,240 transactions per block, with the fullest block containing over 25,000 transactions. To compare, the average BCH transaction interval is 90 to 150, while BTC transactions/block usually float between 1,000 and 1,500. Another important finding was that transaction fees have not increased as a result of a massive spike in transactions and have actually shrunk from $0.002 to $0.0017.

Bitcoin Cash has started last week poorly, with its price hovering around $530 on Monday. However, BCH has made great strides since then, with crypto aficionados getting excited about the upcoming stress test. Its price has continued to climb throughout the week, peaking at around $650 on Sunday. It has slightly decreased at press time and trades at around $625. The market cap of BCH has increased by $1.7 billion in the last 7 days.

BCH has had a tough year so far, undergoing a “hard fork” back in May to increase the maximum block size from 8MB to 32MB. Also, its commercial use was reported to be diminishing with only $3.7 million worth of commercial payments recorded from March to May, dropping from $10.5 million the previous three months.

Nonetheless, the downturn should not be surprising as the entire crypto industry has endured a torrid year so far. Bitcoin payments plummeted by 85 percent from September 2017 to March 2018 but its use volume remains miles ahead of bitcoin cash.

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