GP on the VM-Limits and BigInt CHIPs: Statement and Recommendations for the Rest of the Ecosystem

We at General Protocols hereby formally announce that we support CHIP-2021-05-vm-limits: Targeted Virtual Machine Limits per commit 6b87d517081f2fdba6a50b8e7fb9147321def609, and CHIP-2024-07-BigInt: High-Precision Arithmetic for Bitcoin Cash per commit d1406b6984c5528983a029c79111646e95286b8c for activation on mainnet BCH in May 2025.

As a native BCH smart contract focused company, we expect the two proposals to enable simpler, more secure and more powerful uses for BCH as programmable money, in line with a streak of useful BCH Script upgrades that started in 2022. We are already seeing infrastructure preparations to take advantage of this in the work such as Cashscript, and we expect more projects to come online in the months to come.

The Bigints proposal was announced later than most other CHIP precedents in a barebones form, which did cause concern for us as we expressed in our previous assessment. We are nonetheless impressed by the rapid pace of its progress and the rigorous discussions that has taken place since our last assessment. The Bigints proposal integrates well with the VM-Limits CHIP, and both proposals would be in poorer shape without the other. In our opinion both CHIPs have met the bars for rigor established in previous years, and are now in sufficiently good shape for inclusion together.

This endorsement shall not be taken as an endorsement for latecoming proposals in general: Circumstances around the Bigints CHIP was extraordinary, and correspondingly extraordinary efforts were made to secure it in time both technically and socially. We believe we have contributed our share in offering constructive scrutiny through the process, and would like to see the bar remain high in terms of robustness and timeliness for future CHIPs.

Recommendation for Ecosystem: Miners and Pools

We expect the two CHIPs to increase commercial traffic on BCH and improve its appeal as a more powerful form of programmable money, increasing both transaction fees and coin value and therefore your revenue. Risks to the network seems adequately examined. We recommend support for the proposals.

Recommendation for Ecosystem: BCH node developers

The two CHIPS present significant work to implement, but no greater than some of the activated packages in the past such as CHIP-2022-02-CashTokens. Considering its benefit to the application developers, it seems well worth the workload. We recommend support for the proposals, and a compatible release as soon as possible.

Recommendation for Ecosystem: BCH application and contract developers

We expect the CHIPs to significantly expand what's possible for apps and smart contracts, as well as enabling simpler and more secure versions of existing contracts. We recommend support for the proposals.

Recommendation for Ecosystem: Holders

These proposals are expected to increase BCH's coin value through making it significantly more powerful as programmable money. We recommend support for the proposals.

Recommendation for Ecosystem: Exchanges

Exchanges are expected to only need the bare minimum for upgrade, swapping out their nodes just as the years before. We do not expect significant controversy for either of the proposals, therefore exchanges should not be concerned about downtime or making difficult choices. We do expect expanded smart contract usecases to lead to increased general trading volumes, there benefitting exchange profits. We recommend support for the proposals.

Recommendation for Ecosystem: Retail and commercial users

While we do not expect any immediate effects upon activation, as more smart contracts emerge we expect BCH's utility to improve for users, similar to how the Checkdatasig and Introspection upgrades enabled our own product, BCHBull, to serve latent stabilization and speculation needs among even the most ordinary retail users. We recommend support for the proposals.