The bitcoin fork on August 1, which produced the cryptocurrency and network Bitcoin Cash (BCH), turns one month old today Friday. The digital currency’s market value is lower than last week and the network’s hashrate has dropped considerably, as it is currently more profitable to mine the legacy chain.
Also Read: Now Bitcore Nodes Can Switch to Any Bitcoin Implementation — Even Forks
Four Bitcoin Cash Mining Pools Move Back to the Legacy Chain
At the time of writing the BCH chain has processed 5737 blocks since the blockchain split. Currently, BCH is the longest chain ahead of BTC by 1504 blocks, and mining difficulty is still only 13 percent compared to the legacy chain’s difficulty. However, the price per BTC has risen exponentially to a new all time high, and it’s currently 25 percent more profitable to mine.
Because of this, many mining pools have switched back to the BTC chain and only seven pools remain on the BCH chain. The four ‘known’ pools still processing BCH blocks include pool.Bitcoin.com, Viabtc, Antpool, and BTC.top. The three ‘unknown’ mining pools are now capturing a larger portion of the network’s hashrate, processing 72 percent of the last 144 blocks. The BCH hashrate is currently operating at only ½ of an exahash as most of the pools are now back to pointing towards the legacy chain.
The BCH Bear Market
Presently, the price of bitcoin cash is roughly $590 or 0.175 BTC, and the digital currency still holds the third highest market capitalization. BCH trade volume is pretty thin, and the currency’s 24-hour volume is only $325M, but it’s still the third most traded cryptocurrency by volume. Looking at the charts, the short term Simple Moving Average (SMA) is far lower than the longer term average, which means right now it’s a seller’s market. Relative Strength Index (RSI) has been heading south as well, indicating the bears are still in control for the time being. It’s worth noting that a significant portion of BCH has yet to move into exchanges due to some exchanges and wallets releasing their Bitcoin Cash extraction tools weeks or even months from now.
New Bitcoin Cash Infrastructure
More businesses added support for bitcoin cash recently, adding more depth to the currency’s infrastructure. This week BCH supporters were pleasantly surprised to hear that payment processor Coinify will now support bitcoin cash.
“We have received several inquiries to support bitcoin cash and decided to implement it into our merchant payment service,” explains the company. “Coinify merchants and e-commerces can now add bitcoin cash to bitcoin and 13 other cryptocurrencies as payment options for their customers.”
Additionally, the multi-currency wallet platform Cryptonator has added support for BCH this week. Another wallet company, Bitgo, added support for BCH on August 30 as well. Bitgo V2 API users can also access their BCH alongside litecoin, and ethereum. Following this announcement the payment processing company Bitpay revealed Bitcore modular full nodes would be able to work with any bitcoin client including forked versions. This means Bitcore users can designate their software towards the BCH chain.
Overall the bitcoin cash network is moving along, after an interesting month of added infrastructure and the rise in price after a low of $250 per BCH. The chain still has a long way to go, but for its first month, bitcoin cash has shown the blockchain wasn’t “dead on arrival”, like many opponents predicted. Moreover, the chain has been processing lots of bigger blocks, as the past four blocks mined just now were larger than 1MB.
What do you think about the bitcoin cash blockchain so far? Do you think there are a lot more struggles ahead? Or do you see brighter days for BCH in the future? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Crypto Compare, Coin Dance and Bitcoincash.org.
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