Bitcoin Cash Roundup: New Apps, Announcements and Developments

This week, the decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash has seen some market gains and there’s also been a slew of new announcements and development over the past couple of weeks. Currently, the price per BCH is around $1,120 after dropping below the $1K range the week prior. Moreover, since the fork this past May the BCH-ecosystem has seen all types of application development and community projects launched with a new announcement nearly every day.

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Today’s Bitcoin Cash Statistics

It’s been over 10 months since the August 1 fork and today the BCH chain is roughly 7201 blocks ahead of the Bitcoin Core (BTC) chain. Since then, the decentralized cryptocurrency ecosystem has performed two successful hard forks, one of which changed the currency’s difficulty algorithm, while the other fork added new OP_Codes, and raised the base block size to 32 MB. Over the past year, the BCH hashrate has grown exponentially and this week the hashrate is averaging close to 5 exahash per second between roughly 12 different mining pools. This Friday, June 8, the Bitcoin Cash chain is 1.5% more profitable to mine according to Coin Dance statistics. Further Coin Dance data details that it is 5.95x more expensive to transact on the BTC network today.

Market data shows that BCH is down 2 percent today but has gained 13 percent over the last seven days. The market has a lot more trade volume today than a few days prior with $516Mn BCH swapped over the past 24-hours. The top exchanges trading the most BCH liquidity include Okex, Binance, L Bank, EXX, and Huobi. Bitcoin Cash is the fourth highest market capitalization still but also holds the fourth highest trade volume for June 8, 2018. The strongest currency pair with BCH is BTC which captures 41 percent of trades. This is followed by tether (USDT 30.8%), USD (15.1%), KRW (7.9%), and ETH (1.3%).

New Platform Announcements, the Miners Choice Initiative, and Development Funding

Overall, the sentiment within the BCH community has been very positive, as there have been lots of announcements over the past couple of weeks. For instance, this past week 100+ coders met in China to develop BCH-based applications and organizers detail the event was a huge success. The Cryptonize.it team announced the launch of a new BCH-centric wallet called Cash Pay that allows anyone to purchase anything online. A few days later, the Cryptonize.it founder Ari explained to news.Bitcoin.com about how his team helped an anonymous developer create a new decentralized fundraising platform called Lighthouse.cash.

Earlier this week, we reported on a “Miners Choice” initiative started by the mining pools operated by Nchain, and Coingeek which aims to remove the BCH dust limit if 546 satoshis, alongside allowing some free transactions per block. Nchain’s Dr. Craig Wright spoke with news.Bitcoin.com about the initiative and he encouraged other mining pools to join the cause. So far since we reported on the topic, the mining pools Bitcoin.com and Viabtc have pledged to support the initiative. In addition to this, the Bitcoin.com pool has started to donate a fraction of block rewards to BCH development and has donated the funds to the Bitcoin ABC development team this week.

Bitcoin Cash Community Energy Still at Full Throttle

Other BCH announcements include the popular streaming gaming platform Twitch now allows BCH tips by utilizing the Streamlabs app tethered to their Coinbase accounts. An encrypted messaging service was launched this week that’s tethered to the BCH network called Keyport. Bitcoin Cash was featured in the UK’s popular financial magazine Moneyweek two days ago in an editorial detailing why investors should invest in BCH. Last but not least, the trading platform Boaexchange has added BCH as their base currency and default values. The Coinex exchange is another trading platform that also offers BCH trading pairs with other popular cryptocurrencies.

Overall, the BCH community is optimistic about the future and pleased with the latest developments and announcements concerning the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem. One unique headline this week came from the Philippines, as there’s a decked out customized BCH Jeepney that drives between Philcoa in Quezon City and T.M. Kalaw in Manila every day. The BCH Jeepney project was initiated by 20 BCH community members who donated 0.5 BCH each, and the bus plans to accept bitcoin cash in the near future.

There’s been a lot going on which has invoked a positive energy around the entire community, so far this fervor has been at full throttle.

What do you think about the BCH market and infrastructure the past few weeks? Let us know your thoughts on this subject in the comments section below.

Images via Shutterstock, Satoshi Pulse, and Visor.

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