Today marks the first on year anniversary of Bitcoin Cash since the original fork completed ok August 1st at block 478559. Since then, Bitcoin Cash has become the most dominant and highly-valued BTC fork that retains any portion of the “Bitcoin” name. While other forks like Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond have mostly failed to keep interest up, Bitcoin Cash has attracted an almost religious following, with legions of believers swearing that it is the true Bitcoin, and that BTC is merely a predecessor or ancestor to what they consider the only real Bitcoin. But how has the asset performed in the last year in terms of adoption and financial growth?
BCH One Year On – Financials
To understand where BCH is today, we need to understand where it came from when it was born through the August 1, 2017 fork.
When BCH first appeared on coinmarketcap.com, the asset was trading for $555. Today, BCH is trading for around $750. When it comes to USD value, BCH is showing a clear, steady upward trend since it’s inception. Here’s what that looks like on a graph:
Now let’s take a look at how BCH has performed against BTC. On launch, BCH went for 0.199 BTC, or roughly 5 BCH could be bought for 1 BTC. But when we fast forward to today, we can see that BCH has dropped by half in terms of it’s BTC value. Today, just over 10 BCH can be purchased with 1 BTC. This can be seen in the graph below:
BCH Transaction Volume
With the numbers out of the way, let’s take a look and see how many transactions BCH is processing each day, as a network. Here is the BCH transaction chart from bitinfocharts.com:
According to these charts, BCH started with an average of between 5,000 and 10,000 transactions per day, peak periods excluded.
Since June 2018, however, transactions per day have increased to an average of 20,000 per day, with a number of high peaks topping out at 100,000 per day. But how does this compare with BTC?
The last 12 months has seen BTC processing transaction amounts of between 200,000 and 400,000 per day. So when we compare this to BCH, what does this tell us? Simply put, BCH is undoubtedly growing, but it still has a long way to go until it seeing BTC-levels of activity.
BCH Use Cases
One last thing we’d like to consider is – who is accepting Bitcoin Cash? As it’s name suggests, Bitcoin Cash is intended to be a more nimble currency that is ideal for real world use cases like buying goods and services.
According to this Tweet by Bitcoin.com (a site that is overtly pro-BCH and anti BTC), Bitcoin Cash has “10,000+” merchants that accept it.
Happy Bitcoin Cash Day!
Today marks 1 Year since the #BitcoinRebirth
20,000-25,000 transactions per day
10,000+ merchants accepting BCH
62394+ blocks mined
Thanks to the whole #BitcoinCash community for supporting the true vision of #Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash! pic.twitter.com/oyO9L71Kj1
— Bitcoin.com (@BitcoinCom) August 1, 2018
Another site, acceptbitcoin.cash, lists a total of 687 merchants that accept BCH. Admittedly, it’s a difficult undertaking to try and track every single business that accepts BCH or any other cryptocurrency. However, evidence suggests that a growing number of merchants and businesses are accepting BCH as a form of payment.
The same can be said for BTC. According to a 2015 article in the IB Times, there were 100,000 or more merchants accepting BTC at that time already. Given recent trends, it’s safe to say that the number today is decidedly higher than it was back in 2015.
Wrap Up
So what does all this mean for Bitcoin Cash? We here at Blockonomi don’t have a specific opinion on the BTC versus BCH debate, but the numbers tell us two things.
First, Bitcoin Cash is growing. It’s USD price is up, it’s transaction volume is up, and merchants are accepting it for payment. Second, Bitcoin Cash still has a long way to go in order for it to catch up or replace BTC. For the BCH faithful, however, things are looking bright and there is still a lot more room left for growth and expansion.
