Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Price and Market Data

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) split from Bitcoin in August 2017 after years of disagreement, known as the 'block size wars', over whether Bitcoin's 1 MB block limit should be raised to accommodate more transactions per block. One side of that dispute implemented a hard fork that raised the limit to 8 MB at launch; everyone holding BTC at the fork block received an equal balance of BCH, since the two chains shared identical history up to that point.

BCH inherited Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap and its four-year halving schedule, so the monetary policy is structurally the same even though the two networks have been run independently, with separate developer teams and separate node software, since the split.

The defining technical choice is block size. Bitcoin Cash raised its limit multiple times after the 2017 fork and now supports blocks up to 32 MB, dramatically larger than Bitcoin's roughly 1–4 MB effective capacity after SegWit. Larger blocks mean more transactions can be confirmed per ten-minute interval and fees stay very low even under load, but they also mean each block takes longer to propagate and validate, which raises the bandwidth and storage requirements for anyone running a full node — a trade-off BCH's designers accepted deliberately.

Bitcoin Cash uses a different difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) from Bitcoin's original 2,016-block retarget. After experiencing volatile hashrate swings as miners moved opportunistically between BCH and BTC in the months after the fork, the network switched to an algorithm that retargets difficulty after every block based on a rolling window, aiming to keep block times closer to the ten-minute target even when hashrate is unstable. That history of DAA changes is a direct legacy of BCH's smaller, more mobile mining base relative to Bitcoin.

More recent upgrades added CashTokens, a native token standard that lets fungible and non-fungible tokens exist directly on the Bitcoin Cash ledger without a separate smart-contract virtual machine, and CashFusion, an optional privacy protocol that lets multiple users combine transactions (a form of coinjoin) to obscure the trail between inputs and outputs.

• Maximum block size: up to 32 MB, versus Bitcoin's roughly 1-4 MB effective limit.
• Same 21 million supply cap and four-year halving cadence as Bitcoin.
• CashTokens: native token issuance without a separate VM.
• CashFusion: optional coinjoin-style privacy feature.

Bitcoin Cash is positioned explicitly as a payments coin for merchants and everyday transactions rather than a savings asset or settlement layer. Its low, stable fees — typically a small fraction of a cent regardless of network activity — make it usable for point-of-sale and remittance-style transfers in a way that Bitcoin's base layer, with its fee spikes during congestion, is not. A number of merchant-payment processors and a handful of regions with active local BCH communities use it for exactly this reason.

CashTokens has enabled a small ecosystem of BCH-native fungible tokens and NFTs, though this remains far smaller in scale than token activity on Ethereum or other smart-contract chains. CashFusion sees use among BCH holders who want optional transaction privacy without adopting a separate privacy coin.

Bitcoin Cash's hashrate is a small fraction of Bitcoin's, because most SHA-256 mining capacity has stayed with the more valuable and more liquid BTC. Lower hashrate means a lower cost to mount a 51% attack, where an attacker with a majority of mining power could double-spend transactions or reorganise recent blocks; this is not a hypothetical for BCH specifically — the same SHA-256 hardware that mines Bitcoin can be redirected to attack BCH, which several smaller SHA-256 chains have suffered in practice.

The project has also split further since 2017: a 2018 dispute over further protocol changes produced a second hard fork, creating Bitcoin SV (BSV) and leaving Bitcoin Cash as the continuation of the original fork under its existing name. That history of repeated splits reflects an unusually contentious governance culture and means holders should not assume the current roadmap is settled or unanimous.

Large blocks impose real costs: running a full validating BCH node requires more bandwidth, storage and processing than a Bitcoin node handling the same real-world usage, which over time can concentrate node operation among fewer, better-resourced participants — arguably reducing the decentralisation that block-size increases were meant to preserve at scale.

The August 2017 fork followed roughly two years of public disagreement inside the Bitcoin community about how to scale the network, a debate that also produced the SegWit upgrade on the Bitcoin side. Bitcoin Cash launched with broad support from a segment of miners and businesses who believed larger blocks were the more direct scaling path.

The November 2018 split into Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV was triggered by a dispute over a scheduled upgrade and effectively a contested 'hash war' between two mining factions, each claiming to be the legitimate continuation of the project. Since then Bitcoin Cash has pursued its own upgrade cadence, including scheduled May and November network upgrades, and added CashTokens and CashFusion as its main differentiating features, while its market share and hashrate relative to Bitcoin have both declined from their 2017 peak.