About

Bitcoin Cash is a Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain forked in August 2017 after Bitcoin was hard forked. The primary purpose is to offer a decentralized peer-to-peer cash network akin to Bitcoin but with specific modifications intended to enhance transaction throughput and minimize transaction costs. These modifications included an initial increase in block size from Bitcoin's one MB to eight MB, allowing a larger volume of transactions to be processed per block.

History

Bitcoin Cash was founded by former Bitcoin miners following a hard fork of Bitcoin in August 2017.

Throughout 2017, a contentious debate occurred regarding Bitcoin’s transaction fee models and scalability measures. One argument, led by prominent figures such as Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, and Haipo Yang, suggested increasing the Bitcoin block size beyond its one MB limit to improve transaction capacity and lower future block congestion. Supporters of this proposal believed that Bitcoin would need to sufficiently scale its transaction capability to compete with legacy financial institutions and payment processors. Counter to this, others argued that Bitcoin’s core value proposition is censorship resistance and trust minimization. These proponents warned that increasing block size would make running a node too costly and diminish decentralization. The Bitcoin Cash hard fork was supported by miners that sought to increase the block size limit and create a more scalable Proof-of-Work (PoW) network. Anyone that held BTC at the time of the hard fork (block 478558 - Aug. 1, 2017) also became a BCH tokenholder.

Bitcoin Cash has undergone a variety of upgrades since launching:

• November 2019 - This upgrade enabled Schnorr signatures for “OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY)” and enforced minimal push and number encoding rules in Script.
• May 2020 - This upgrade added (i) “SigChecks,” a new signature check function that runs while a script is being executed, (ii) “OP_REVERSEBYTES,” a new opcode implemented to add smart contract capabilities to the network, and (iii) Automatic Replay Protection, a mechanism that would remove validating nodes from the network if they do not upgrade.
• August 2020 - Bitcoin Cash Node released V22.0.0, which upgraded the protocol’s difficulty adjustment algorithm to ASERT.
• May 2021 - This upgrade introduced two changes: (i) the removal of the unconfirmed transaction chain limit and (ii) the allowance of transactions with multiple “OP_Return” outputs.
• May 2022 - This upgrade included changes to Bitcoin Cash’s contract capabilities and Opcodes. Two CHIPs were activated as part of this upgrade: (i) CHIP-2021-03: Bigger Script Integers and (ii) CHIP-2021-02: Native Introspection Opcodes.
• May 2023 - Changes in this upgrade included enforcing valid transaction version field values, reducing the minimum transaction size, introducing token primitives, and enabling changes to the Bitcoin Cash transaction script.
• June 2023 - Bitcoin Cash Node released V26.1.0, which included bug fixes and new features (e.g., RPC fields).
• December 2023 - Bitcoin Cash Node released v27.0.0, which included CHIP-2023-04: Adaptive Blocksize Limit Algorithm for Bitcoin Cash. This new consensus rule, activating on May 15, 2024, will automatically adjust the block size limit after each block. This release aims to optimize the block size based on network usage and “reduce infrastructure costs during periods of lower usage while enabling a potential doubling of the maximum block size per year.”

In May 2025, Bitcoin Cash has successfully upgraded with improvements around virtual machine limits and high-precision arithmetic.

In September 2025, Grayscale Investments filed with the U.S. SEC to launch a Bitcoin Cash ETF (BCHG) . These ETFs were structured under the newly streamlined SEC framework for crypto commodities.