Published
4 years ago on
April 10, 2020
This week marked an important milestone for Bitcoin Cash, as last Wednesday the crypto-asset reached block height 630,000 and cut the mining reward by half to 6.25 BCH every 10 minutes. This event happens every four years or more specifically after 210,000 have been mined.
While most of the crypto news sites were talking about how this halving took almost 2 hours to be completed and how some miners left the network after this, we decided to analyze what happened on that day from a different and more data-centric perspective.
A quick summary of Bitcoin Cash:
Bitcoin Cash is a hard-forked version of the original Bitcoin Blockchain similar to Litecoin or Dash. It was created in August 2017 and the main intention was to increase the block size that would allow more transactions to be processed. Major stakeholders such as Roger Ver proposed to increase the size of blocks to 8 MB. The number of transactions on Bitcoin Cash’s blockchain can reach 25,000 per block. It also differs from Bitcoin in the fact that it does not incorporate SegWit as a solution to accommodate more transactions.
Now that we have a basic understanding of the project, let’s dig into some key data points of that day by leveraging the IntoTheBlock platform.
1. The daily addresses activity went through the roof.
On Wednesday, the same day the Halvening occurred, there was a huge spike in the number of active addresses in the Bitcoin Cash network.
A total of 161 thousand addresses were active on that day, which represents a 388% increase compared to the 33 thousand active addresses on Monday.
The number of new addresses entering the network also saw a big increase of 357% during the last 7 days as did the number of addresses leaving the network (zero balance) by 363.76%.
2.Perpetual Swaps Volume reached a 7-day high.
A quick explanation: perpetual swaps are a kind of derivative that does not have an expiration date.
Bitcoin Cash perpetual swaps volume saw a big recovery on Wednesday, reaching a 7-day high of $465.96 million. On Wednesday, the volume for perpetual swaps increased by 103% compared to the previous day.
3. The number of on-chain transactions also increased dramatically.
At IntoTheBlock we measure the number and volume of on-chain transactions in a given period. On April 8, a total of 95.85 thousand transactions and 1.62m BCH were moved. This number represents a 7-day high and a 180% increase compared to the previous day.
4.The Average Time Between Transactions was also affected
As I mentioned before, the block number 630,000 took almost two hours to be completed, and this can be reflected in the average time between on-chain transactions.
Before this occurred, the average time on the last 30-days was 10 minutes (same as the block time), but with the problem during the halving, that number increase to 26 minutes on April 9.
5. Most of the activity on Halving day came from the West.
As the number of on-chain transactions that Wednesday increased dramatically, we were able to identify that most of the activity on that day came from the East, meaning that 90.43% of the on-chain transactions during that day happened between 10:01 PM to 10:00 AM UTC. This represents quite a bit of an anomaly since the predominance of transactions from All Time was 54% in the west.
As you can see, on-chain activity combined with other factors as derivatives provides us a much deeper and insightful understanding of this asset.
While the mining activity for Bitcoin Cash was affected after the halving, other indicators tell us that Bitcoin Cash has a strong on-chain fundamental with a good community behind it.
Interested in learning more about this? Go to https://app.intotheblock.com/ and sign up for free to gain access to +60 indicators for over 700 crypto-assets including BCH.
Investment Disclaimer
