Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Pre-Halving Excitement: Open Interest Crosses $700M, Nearing May 2021 Levels

• The bullish trend for BCH, marking a 55% increase over the past week, aligns with the upcoming Bitcoin Cash halving event scheduled for April 4.
• Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts witness a notable rise in open interest (OI), hitting an all-time high of $708.75 million on March 28.

Bitcoin’s first hardforked version Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has registered a strong move on the upside gaining an additional 11% in the last 24 hours and currently trading at $633 with a market cap of $12.49 billion. Over the last week, the BCH price is up by a staggering 55% as we approach the Bitcoin Cash halving event scheduled next week on April 4, as reported by Crypto News Flash.

Short positions worth $190,140 and long positions worth $211,870 were liquidated on Thursday, March 28. Simultaneously, open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts surged to all-time highs of $708.75 million on the same day. This spike represented an 18.26% increase within 24 hours and a remarkable 165% surge over the past 7 days, according to CoinGlass data.

The most recent occurrence approaching this threshold was in May 2021 when the open interest (OI) reached $684.12 million. This coincided with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) reaching its highest price in the past five years, peaking at $1,399. In contrast, on the same date in 2020, futures open interest stood at $63.29, just before the first-ever BCH halving on April 8, 2020.

Back then, miner rewards were reduced by half from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH. However, miners appear to be interpreting this as a signal to ramp up their mining activities in anticipation of the impending halving.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Hash Rate Jumps

According to a post by a user named “DavidShares” on X, shared with his 17,900 followers, the Bitcoin Cash hash rate has doubled over the past week.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hashrate has doubled this week #bitcoincash #bch pic.twitter.com/hNzgLUwn9s

— DΛVID (@DavidShares) March 28, 2024

The hash rate represents the total computational power utilized for mining and processing transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, quantified by the number of generated hashes.

Despite Bitcoin nearing its fourth halving on April 21 amidst reaching record highs, Bitcoin Cash lags significantly behind its all-time peak of $4,355, observed in December 2017.

Bitcoin Cash’s halving occurs slightly earlier than Bitcoin’s due to its temporary use of a different algorithm to adjust mining difficulty back in 2017, thereby accelerating block creation time. The upcoming Bitcoin halving will happen next month on April 21.

In addition to halving, Bitcoin Cash is also gearing up for another major upgrade in May 2024. The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) upgrade scheduled for May 2024, dubbed CHIP-2023-04 Adaptive Blocksize Limit Algorithm, has been effectively implemented on chipnet at block number 174519, per the Crypto News Flash report.

This upgrade tackles an economic vulnerability that emerged in 2010, which led to the split of the BCH/BTC network in 2017. The algorithm autonomously adapts the block size limit of Bitcoin Cash, cutting down infrastructure expenses during periods of decreased activity, while permitting a potential annual doubling of the maximum block size during periods of heightened growth.