What is Bitcoin Cash (BCH)?

Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin with bigger blocks. In 2017 Bitcoin's community split over how to scale: one side wanted larger blocks so more transactions fit on the base layer, the other wanted to keep blocks small so anyone could run a node and to move volume to layers above. The small-block side kept the Bitcoin name. The big-block side forked and became Bitcoin Cash.

Everything else was inherited — the 21 million cap, the halving schedule, SHA-256 proof of work, the UTXO model. Every holder at the fork received an equal balance on both chains. What differs is the block size, now 32MB, and everything that has been built since.

How the argument turned out

Bitcoin won decisively on price, liquidity, institutional adoption and name. It is worth saying plainly and it is also not the whole story: Bitcoin Cash does the thing it forked to do. Transactions confirm quickly, fees are a fraction of a cent, and the chain has run for nine years without incident. As a payment system it works better than Bitcoin's base layer at exactly the task the fork was about.

The catch is that almost nobody wants a payment system denominated in a volatile asset. That demand went to stablecoins on cheap chains, which are better at it in the way that matters to a user. Bitcoin Cash won its technical argument into a market that had moved on.

The Layla upgrade

Activated on 15 May 2026 at 12:00 UTC, Layla is the most substantial change to what Bitcoin Cash can do in years. It added four things to the scripting language: bounded loops, a standard way to pay to a script rather than a specific address, reusable function definitions, and the restoration of bitwise operations disabled years earlier.

Individually those sound minor. Together they turn Bitcoin Cash script from a constrained validation language into something closer to a programmable environment — and on top of CashTokens, live since 2023, they let contracts and native tokens run on the base layer without a separate rollup or sidechain. Bitcoin Cash is now meaningfully more programmable than Bitcoin, on the same underlying design.

• Payments and transfers, the purpose of the fork — fast, sub-cent, and reliable.
• Merchant acceptance, where a small but persistent ecosystem of processors and point-of-sale tools exists.
• CashTokens, which put native fungible and non-fungible tokens on the base layer.
• On-chain contracts, now genuinely expanded by the Layla upgrade.

There is no staking, no DeFi ecosystem of consequence and no institutional story. What there is, is a working payment chain with a growing programmability layer and a committed development community — and a market that has priced it as a fork that lost.

Identical to Bitcoin's by inheritance: 21 million cap, halvings every 210,000 blocks, no premine, no team allocation, no foundation tranche. Every BCH in existence was mined, on the schedule set in 2009.

That makes the monetary structure among the cleanest available, and it also means Bitcoin Cash shares Bitcoin's long-term question in a sharper form. Miners are paid by the subsidy plus fees; the subsidy halves toward zero; fees have to make up the difference. Because Bitcoin Cash's fees are deliberately negligible and its transaction volume is far below Bitcoin's, its fee revenue is a much smaller fraction of miner income than Bitcoin's is.

Shared hashrate is the real vulnerability

Bitcoin Cash uses SHA-256, the same algorithm as Bitcoin, on a network worth a small fraction of Bitcoin's. Mining capacity can move between the two chains freely, following profitability. That means a meaningful share of Bitcoin's hashrate could be pointed at Bitcoin Cash — and that the cost of attacking Bitcoin Cash is a small fraction of the cost of attacking Bitcoin, using hardware that already exists and is already pointed at a compatible chain. This is the most serious structural issue with the asset, and it is a direct consequence of keeping Bitcoin's algorithm.

Bitcoin Cash cannot be staked. It is proof of work with no bonding mechanism and no protocol yield.

Mining is the only way the protocol pays anyone, using the same SHA-256 ASICs that mine Bitcoin — which is why capacity moves between the two chains with profitability. Any product advertising BCH staking is a lending arrangement, with a counterparty the chain itself does not have.

51% attack cost is low relative to Bitcoin

Same algorithm, far smaller network. The hardware needed to attack Bitcoin Cash already exists in quantity and is currently pointed at Bitcoin. This is not theoretical for smaller SHA-256 chains, and it is the clearest risk on this page.

The use case went to stablecoins

Bitcoin Cash was built to be electronic cash. The market decided that electronic cash should not fluctuate 5% while a payment settles, and moved to dollar tokens on cheap chains. Bitcoin Cash is technically better at its job than it was in 2017 and the job has largely been reassigned.

Fork history and fragmentation

Bitcoin Cash itself split again in 2018, producing Bitcoin SV, and again in 2020 over a development funding proposal. Each split cost community, hashrate and credibility. A chain that resolves disagreements by forking has a structural tendency to keep doing it.

Security budget, in a harder form than Bitcoin's

Halvings cut the subsidy on the same schedule as Bitcoin's, and Bitcoin Cash's negligible fees and lower volume mean fee revenue replaces far less of it. The question Bitcoin will face in decades, Bitcoin Cash faces sooner and with fewer options — raising fees would undo the thing it forked for.

Layla's programmability is new code on an old chain

Loops, functions and restored bitwise operations expand what script can do and expand the surface where something can go wrong. Bitcoin Cash's safety record rests partly on script having been deliberately limited. The upgrade is well reviewed and it is a change in that posture.