Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the branch of Bitcoin that keeps the design described in Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper: peer-to-peer electronic cash, on-chain capacity that scales with demand, and Simplified Payment Verification so ordinary users can transact without running a full node. This page is a directory of the ecosystem — reference clients, wallets, developer communities, CashTokens, and the site's own reading of the 2017 upgrade paths.
On 1 August 2017 at block 478,559 this branch activated the on-chain scaling upgrade
Nakamoto described from the start: raising the base block-size limit as network demand
grows. The base block moved to 8 MB in 2017 and to 32 MB in 2018 — the same
height-triggered mechanism Nakamoto sketched in October 2010
(if (blocknumber > 115000) maxblocksize = largerlimit), executed. Later
upgrades kept the original Nakamoto Consensus economic rules (no Segregated Witness, no
Replace-By-Fee) and added Schnorr signatures (2019), OP_CHECKDATASIG for
on-chain contracts, and CashTokens for native fungible and non-fungible token issuance
(May 2023).
Consensus is unchanged from the original design: SHA-256 Proof of Work, ten-minute block target, twenty-one-million supply cap. Live figures — price, hashrate, supply, markets and links — sit on the Bitcoin Cash asset page; the pre-rendered snapshot version is at /assets/bitcoin-cash.
BCHN — the reference implementation used by most of the network. C++, Bitcoin Core lineage, MIT-licensed. Coordination: t.me/bitcoincashnode.
A second full-node implementation with the same consensus rules — client diversity matters, and BU has shipped several BCH consensus upgrades.
A third node implementation from Kth-io — high-performance C++ core designed for wallets, exchanges and researchers wanting a library-shaped interface.
An indexing gateway — full node plus purpose-built APIs for wallet and merchant backends that need address, UTXO and transaction subscriptions in one place.
The May 2023 upgrade activated CashTokens — a consensus-level, UTXO-model token protocol that lets BCH carry fungible and non-fungible tokens the way Ethereum carries ERC-20s, but validated by the base chain itself rather than by a smart contract deployed on top of it. That makes BCH one of the few chains where token issuance sits at the same layer as the coin.
The site's BCH asset page lists the wallets we've curated — every non-custodial option is shown, hardware first. The BCH-native short list: Cashonize (web + WalletConnect, CashTokens native), Paytaca (mobile + browser extension, CashTokens native), Electron Cash (desktop, SPV, long history), Zapit (mobile, BCH-first, in-app P2P). Ledger, Trezor and Keystone all support BCH on the hardware side.
Same protocol lineage, same SHA-256, same 21-million cap — and three separate cryptocurrencies in the ranking. Applying the counting rule to its hardest case.
On 1 August the network activated a block-size upgrade; three weeks later a separate SegWit upgrade activated on the same network. Calling one "Bitcoin" and the other "a fork of Bitcoin" is inheritance by ticker, not by protocol history.
SegWit is universally called a soft fork because legacy nodes did not crash when it activated. On the mechanics, it was a hard fork wearing a soft-fork label.
Ten Bitcoin Core regtest nodes at six hashpower ratios; direct anyone-can-spend and BIP144 stripping tests on real Bitcoin Core 0.12.1; the precise split trigger isolated.
The links on this page are ecosystem entry points. Their inclusion means we know they exist and are used; it isn't a recommendation, an audit, or a security assessment. If you're evaluating a wallet or a token before putting money into it, read the docs, run it in a small-stakes way first, and prefer projects that ship open source. The site's methodology explains the counting rules that decide what appears here and what doesn't.