@Alther 16 September 2025 more from that month

Exploring Bitcoin Cash’s Roadmap: From OP_EVAL to Faster Blocks BCH is entering the next phase of its evolution. After having gone through some crucial upgrades, the developers have outlined a roadmap that might define BCH's further course for the next few years. The focus is not only on the speed of transactions but also on empowering smart contracts along with DeFi apps and some technical upgrades to keep BCH competitive. One of the major milestones is OP_EVAL in 2026, and its implementation-equipped BCH with sophisticated layers of smart contracts. Essentially, the OP_EVAL could shift BCH from being merely a fast and cheap digital cash system into a proper DeFi platform. Consider Bitcoin Cash not only being used for grocery shopping but also for lending purposes, doing derivatives, or depositing in yield farming protocols built straight into its blockchain. Then the roadmap turns to Loop Constructs in 2026-2027, which is meant to introduce loop capabilities into the scripting language. Although it sounds too technical, it is an important bridge to developing flexible applications. Smart contracts will be able to natively execute repeated instructions. At the same time, making this process highly technical, developers are engaged in the Pay-to-Script Upgrades in 2026-2027 directly enhancing multsignature setup flexibility and custody solutions, thereby strengthening security and asset management at the protocol level for the interests of institutional services and the safe key management of individual users. Finally, we have a proposal for block time reduction that does not have a fixed timeline yet. This proposal aims at reducing the current block time from ten minutes or so to about two minutes. Should that be approved, the effect would be that a transaction could be confirmed much faster, thus making BCH even more usable on a daily basis for retail payments. However, with such a massive change, there is a cost-benefit analysis of security, decentralization, and network efficiency that needs careful consideration. The roadmap would thus describe the efforts at the Bitcoin Cash end to strike a balance between two identities: as instant low-fee digital money, and as a platform that could host decentralized applications. Should the milestones be achieved, BCH would likely look quite different five years from now. Yet, as with everything else open source, the vision and all of its possible world-changing potential depend on the community and the builders as well as the extent and form under which such changes are adopted in the real world.