Bitcoin Cash

What it is

Bitcoin Cash is what happened when the Bitcoin community’s argument about its own future could no longer be contained. On 1 August 2017 the network split in two over a single question: should Bitcoin’s blocks stay small, keeping the network easy to run but pushing fees up, or grow larger so it could serve as everyday electronic cash? Bitcoin Cash took the second path. The memorable fact: everyone holding bitcoin at the moment of the split automatically received an equal amount of BCH, making it one of the largest free distributions of an asset in financial history.

How it works

Bitcoin Cash keeps almost all of Bitcoin’s machinery. It uses the same proof-of-work mining, in which computers compete to solve puzzles and the winner adds the next block of transactions, the same 21 million coin cap, and the same halvings, scheduled events that cut the rate of new coin creation in half roughly every four years, most recently in April 2024. The difference is capacity. Bitcoin Cash raised its block size limit to 32 megabytes against Bitcoin’s original one, so it can process many more transactions per block and fees stay at fractions of a penny. It also runs its own difficulty adjustment to keep blocks arriving steadily despite sharing mining hardware with Bitcoin, and the 2023 CashTokens upgrade added support for tokens and more capable contracts.

The story so far

The 2017 split concluded years of increasingly bitter debate known as the block size wars. The habit proved catching: Bitcoin Cash itself split in November 2018, when the Bitcoin SV faction departed, and again in November 2020, producing eCash. Through all of it the project has kept shipping scheduled upgrades and holding to its founding reading of the Bitcoin whitepaper, which it hosts on its own site, that the system was meant to be peer-to-peer electronic cash. The uncomfortable counterweight is the market’s verdict: BCH has traded at a small fraction of Bitcoin’s value for its entire existence, and merchant adoption, while real, has stayed modest.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026, CoinGecko ranks Bitcoin Cash 23rd by market value at about $4.2 billion, with the price near $210, roughly 94 per cent below the peak it touched in December 2017. Just over 20 million of the eventual 21 million coins are already mined. What to watch next: whether payment usage grows in markets where card fees bite hardest, how the mining economics evolve as block rewards keep halving, and whether CashTokens attracts developers. Bitcoin Cash remains the most durable expression of the losing side of Bitcoin’s greatest argument, and as of July 2026 it is still here, still cheap to use, and still making its original case.