Is Bitcoin Cash a Good Investment?

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) reached an all-time high of $4,355.62 on December 20, 2017 after just four months of trading which gave investors renewed hope. At its inception, many investors felt it could reach the price milestones of Bitcoin (BTC).

So far, Bitcoin Cash has faced strong resistance due to competition from other altcoins. With several merchants accepting BCH as an option of payment, will the digital coin soar to new all-time highs? With Switzerland-based Investment Product Provider 21 Shares listing BCH on Xetra market, will this cause a huge spike in price due to direct market exposure?

Bitcoin Cash  has been able to provide an improved solution to the scalability issue which parent crypto Bitcoin has been associated with for years which made its adoption in the mainstream a huge problem.

Bitcoin Cash has reached certain milestones such as being accepted as an option of payment on more than 4,000 merchants worldwide.

Following in the footsteps of Bitcoin and Ethereum, in the beginning of March, 2021, BCH was listed as an exchange-traded product on Deutsche Boerse Xetra market. It started trading on the market on Tuesday, March 9, 2021.

Considering the market value of the digital asset in terms of trade volume and capitalization, coupled with the partnerships and integrations in terms of adoption, Bitcoin Cash has a huge potential.  

Such a potential in the crypto finance stratosphere does not solely rely on the achievements of parent crypto but on the coin’s institutional adoption.

This makes the cryptocurrency a great asset you can consider having on your portfolio of investments in the long term as a result of the bright future it promises.

FXLeaders has forecasted a price range of $1,000 to $2,000 for Bitcoin Cash at the end of June 2021 due to positive market sentiment and a recovery from COVID-19.

The online portal which provides forex signals, forecasts and live price charts further opined that the price of BCH will increase to a price range of $1,500 to $2,000 in the short term at the end of 2021.

This will be attributed to people viewing Bitcoin Cash as a safe haven, global politics which will make the digital asset attractive as an investment option and a full recovery from the pandemic.

Bitcoin Cash will have a trade price of at least $5,000 due to hawkish central banks, positive crypto market sentiment, many investors will view it as a safe haven and global economic crises will lead to the adoption of coin by the end of 2025, is the long term forecast of FXLeaders.

What is Bitcoin Cash?

According to the official website of Bitcoin Cash, the digital asset is peer-to-peer electronic cash which is used for sending and receiving digital money over the internet.

In relation to Bitcoin, it is normally referred to as BCash, a product of hard fork, a second version, altcoin, strand, spin-off or an offshoot.  

It is not censored by any intermediaries (traditional banks, clearinghouses or insurance companies).

As a cryptocurrency and payment network, BCH fulfills the original promise of parent crypto (BTC) as peer-to-peer cash and brings sound money to the global world.

Many users and merchants globally rely on BCH as a result of its reliable confirmations and low fees.

With Bitcoin Cash, there is a bright future of financial freedom as a result of its global adoption, unrestricted growth, decentralized development and its permissionless innovation.

Who Created Bitcoin Cash and When did it Start Trading?

Bitcoin Cash thrives on the features of the creation of a man with the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” whose cryptocurrency has served as a template for the creation of other blockchain technologies.

BCH is a clone of Bitcoin and was only created as a split from BTC. 

The main proponents of Bitcoin Cash are several members of the Bitcoin Community who felt BTC needs to improve its scalability to facilitate its mainstream acceptance and adoption by well-established institutions.

One of the members of the community, Roger Ver, normally referred to by the alias “Bitcoin Jesus” is an early investor of the parent crypto, has been involved in the creation of Bitcoin-related startups coupled with his promotional efforts for a wider acceptance of the cryptocurrency, together with other members in the BTC community felt the coin must be maintained as a digital investment and not a transactional currency.

Their proposal was an adoption of “BIP91” without an increment in the limit of the block-size. This would result in making the amount of data which needs to be verified relatively smaller in each block. With this, the creation of transactions will be cheaper and faster.

This was thoroughly disagreed by proponents of the idea of Bitcoin Cash who saw the upgrade as necessary to provide a version of Bitcoin which could serve a primary purpose of being used as a medium of exchange. 

Another school of thought from BCH supporters was that the network of BTC users is soaring to new highs daily as a result of increased interest from traders and investors. 

This has resulted in increased waiting times because there are more transactions that need to be processed but the blockchain is still relying on a technology which is not increasing its speed. 

Their solution was to increase the data size of blocks so that more information could be processed at a single time.

Supporters of Bitcoin Cash were destined to have their way in August 2017 as developers and miners initiated a hard fork (update of software) which effectively created a new currency called BCH.

With this, BCH had its own unique features such as its own blockchain and the implementation of an increased block size from 1 megabyte to 8 megabytes to speed up the verification process.

In 2018, the block size was increased from 8 megabytes to 32 megabytes but the actual block sizes which are created has so far remained just a small fraction of the maximum limit it was increased to.

On first August 1, 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) started trading at a price of almost 10% of the parent crypto ($240) while Bitcoin had a trading price of $2,700. 

Why Was It Created?

Aside from the primary purpose of being used to send and receive money anywhere in the world over the internet in a decentralized manner, BCH was created to provide essential solutions to Bitcoin and the whole world of decentralized finance.

The solutions are scalability and fees. It is a known fact that has been agreed upon by many experts that transaction speed is extremely crucial to the functionality, scalability, widespread adoption and the ultimate success of a cryptocurrency.

Increasing block size data means the cryptocurrency (BCH) can process a high number of transactions per second (TPS) and the swift processing also results in low transaction fees for users of the digital coin.

How Many BCH Are In Supply?

Bitcoin Cash has the same supply as Bitcoin which currently stands at a circulating supply of 18,676,650 BCH which represents 89% of the mined coins of a maximum supply of 21,000,000 BCH.

Bitcoin Cash: Will It Be a Good Investment in 2021?

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) closed December 2021 with a trading price of $343.05. The digital asset had a trading price of $500.95 on the 1st day of March 2021. The crypto asset at the time of writing was trading at $550.40 on Thursday, March 11, 2021, having increased 59.62% Year-to-Date (YTD) and had a market capitalization of $10.28 billion.

Bitcoin Cash could be a good investment in 2021 according to Alejandro Zambrano who foresees a higher percentage return as a result of the digital coin being undervalued.

The Crypto Analyst for FXStreet believes that “There is going to be 22.5% gains in the current trading price of BCH which will see the altcoin reach a trading price of at least $684.93 before the end of the year.

Such bullishness is supported by Coin Price Forecast which has predicted BCH to have a price of $1,220 for the year ended 2021.

The main drivers of Bitcoin Cash are investors who are primarily searching for altcoins which do not only perform the primary function of sending and receiving money but have high trade volumes, relatively low transaction fees and have a lot of institutional usage as part of its adoption.

According to Steven Nickolas of Investopedia, trade volume legitimizes an assets price action which provides great assistance to investors in their decision to either sell or buy and hold onto an asset as part of their investment goals.   

In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin Cash has a trade volume of $4,450,303,887 and its market capitalization puts it at number eleven (11) in terms of rank of cryptocurrencies in the global market.

BCH trades on digital currency exchanges such as Kraken, Gemini, Coinbase, Bitfinex, Bitstamp and ShapeShift.

These are cryptocurrency exchanges which experience high trade volumes daily which symbolizes the interests and demand of traders and investors because of the future potential of the Bitcoin spin-off.

Evidently, in a report by Statista (online portal which provides statistics on market report and consumer data) which was focused on the daily trade volumes of February 22, 2021 on cryptocurrency exchanges, Kraken had a daily trade volume of $1.57 billion.

Coinbase Pro had a trade volume of $3.63 billion and Bitfinex had a trade volume of $1.41 billion. These exchanges featured strongly in the top 30 cryptocurrency exchanges with the highest daily trade volumes.

The volume over the last 10 hours of Gemini was $219.84 million and Bitstamp had a volume of $441,146,077 million in the last 24 hours.

Investment website Charles Schwab believes trade volume serves as a great measure of investor sentiment. “Trade volume can help confirm price trends that have already formed or serve as a warning for a potential trend reversal”.

With the trade volume of Bitcoin Cash as the main thesis to make an investment assessment, BCH currently has an average or increasing trade volume which signals the commitment of traders and investors to the coin in the long term.

Such commitment has extended the trading of BCH into a new market.

In a news article published on Monday, March 8, 2021, financial analyst Tanzeel Akhtar of Yahoo Finance reported that Switzerland-based investment product provider 21Shares is listing Bitcoin Cash (BCH) as well as Ethereum (ETH) as an exchange-traded product (ETP) on Deutsche Boerse’ Xetra market.

The listing took effect on Tuesday, March 9, 2021 with Bitcoin Cash trading under the ticker 21XC.

Chief Executive Officer of 21 Shares, Hany Rashwan pointed out that “After the immensely successful launch of the first Polkadot ETP just a month ago, we are working on several more launches in the second and third quarter and BCH is one of the most tradable assets in the market”.

As a trader who now understands the importance of trade volumes and how it impacts an asset, data released by Deutsche Borse Group in terms of its cash market trading volumes in January, 2021 present great statistics.  

Deutsche Borse’s cash markets generated a turnover of €181.9 billion in January 2021 which is far better than the turnover of the previous year, January 2020, which stood at €145.3 billion.

Out of this, €137.9 billion were attributable to Xetra which in the same month last year, stood at €123.2 billion.

This brings the average daily Xetra trading volume to €6.9 billion and with the inclusion of Bitcoin Cash, the average daily trade volume is poised to increase substantially.

With such trade volume, Smartereum remains extremely optimistic about the potential of BCH and sees it trade for a coin for at least $24,600 in the next five years.

Leading cryptocurrency expert, Brian Kelly of CNBC has described BCH as a must own cryptocurrency and with that Wallet Investor sees a bullish trend in the digital coin which will see it have a trading price of $7,520 in 2023.

According to CoinPedia, Bitcoin Cash will be a good investment in 2021 if it maintains its bullish run in the year so far. It forecasts a price mark of $890 by May and a surge to at least $1,050 by the end of December 2021.

Bitcoin Cash in Comparison to Bitcoin

Network Speed

It is a known fact that Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) both employ the longstanding SHA-256 proof-work-algorithm but an upgrade to the blockchain’s network has given BCH a scalability advantage over its parent crypto (BTC).

Bitcoin can process seven transactions per second (TPS). Aside from this, transactions take a great deal of time before it is confirmed as a result of traffic. Confirmation of transactions can take ten (10) minutes up to one day.

On the other hand, Bitcoin Cash has improved scalability associated with the Bitcoin blockchain as a result of miners and developers initiating a hard fork (an upgrade) to the network. This has helped increase the block size to 8 megabyte (MB) from the previous 1 megabyte used by Bitcoin.

The result is increased acceleration in the verification process which comes with an adjustable level of difficulty that ensures the blockchains survival and transaction verification speed no matter the number of miners who are supporting it.

Bitcoin Cash processes 116 transactions per second (TPS).

Cost

As the popularity of Bitcoin (BTC) surged, many traders and investors gained an extensive interest in the cryptocurrency which led to increased activity on the network. 

Such congestion leads to heavy traffic which ultimately increases the transaction fees of using the blockchain. 

Evidently, the average transaction fee of BTC as at the time of writing was $19.50 as per data retrieved from YCharts. During the crypto boom period of 2017, transaction fees of BTC nearly reached $60.

With transactions being processed in a very quick manner for Bitcoin Cash, this means there is no congestion on the network which results in lower processing fees. 

Evidently, the average transaction fee is $0.0028 which is just a fraction of the price of BCH as per the data retrieved from Bit Info Charts.

Bitcoin Cash in Comparison to other Altcoins

BCH was considered as a spin-off and an asset which will wholly rely on the progress of BTC in the long run but the digital coin’s performance so far has been incredible.

As a large cap crypto asset, BCH has a trade volume of $4,450,303,887, market capitalization of $10.28 billion with an average transaction fee of $0.0028.

Dash (DASH) has a trade volume of $1.24 billion, a market capitalization of $2.35 billion on a circulating supply of 10,016,197 DASH with an average transaction fee that ranges between $0.2 and $0.3.

Litecoin (LTC) has a trade volume of $5.67, a market capitalization of $13.11 billion on a circulating supply of 66,633,737 LTC with an average transaction fee of $0.5.

Cardano (ADA) has a trade volume of $5.35 billion, a market capitalization of $37.39 billion on a circulating supply of 31,948,309,441 ADA with an average transaction fee of $0.18.

Dogecoin (DOGE) has a trade volume of $2.20 billion, a market capitalization of $7.20 billion on a circulating supply of 128,688,190,346 DOGE with an average transaction fee of $0.15.   

Ripple (XRP) has a trade volume of $3.15 billion, a market capitalization of $21.04 billion on a circulating supply of 45,404,028,640 XRP with an average transaction fee of 1XRP ($0.4523).

Stellar Lumens (XLM) has a trade volume of $1.09 billion, a market capitalization of $9.36 on a circulating supply of 22,571,569,356 XLM with an average transaction fee of $0.000004

Tron (TRX) has a trade volume of $1.41 billion, a market capitalization of $3.67 billion on a circulating supply of 71,659,657,369 TRX and has $0 transaction fee.

This means that overall; Bitcoin Cash has better transaction fees than most altcoins.

Bitcoin Cash is trading at upside territory with no sign of slowing down as novice and expert investors thrive on its scalability and low transaction fees to provide effective business solutions to their clients, a great feature that was lacking in BTC.

Will Bitcoin Cash Continue to Soar in 2021?

Bitcoin Cash could continue to soar in 2021 as more companies continue to integrate the coin with their merchants to be used as an option of payment.

After successful partnerships and integrations with more than 4,000 industries, there is going to be a considerable spike in user cases. 

This will in the long run encourage massive participation from other well-established institutions. In the process, this increases trade volume, increases the token’s adoption and results in an increase in the price of the crypto coin.

According to Coin Price Forecast, increased usage and institutional adoption will see the coin trade at $1,220 at the close of the year, trade at $3,169 in the next 5 years and reach at least $4,903 in the next 10 years.

Prime XBT sees many predictions by crypto analysts across several online portals and also remains bullish but at a moderate level. Experts at XBT forecast BCH will reach a new all-time high of $6,700 by the end of 2021.    

In terms of usage, BCH is currently used by 1,385 shops and markets, 655 internet services, 351 offline services, 73 tourism, traveling, renting services, 807 crypto services, 185 business services, 115 web marketing and development, 147 gambling companies and 74 gaming websites.

Popular among all these industries are payment gateways for crypto services (CoinPayments, BitPay, Coinify and WestWallet), hotels (Placid Hotel Zurich), hotel booking website (Travala.com, Cheapair.com, Clube Turismo, Destinia.com and Greitai), clothing and fashion (Hippie Pants, Girl Meets Dress, Satoshi Goods, The Scarf Boutique, Long underwear and Everly and Romeo’s Boutique), pharmacies (Remedys Nutrition and Apothecary, PharmaHemp, Greg’s Botanical and Houston Research Chemical Company), gambling (Satoshi Dice, BetCoin, Satoshi Bones) and hosting services (HostMeNow, Impreza Host, Glowhost, NameCheap and DoHost), online retailer of items (Newegg).

Non-profit organizations and charities of the world such as Heifer International and Save the Children accept BCH as an option of payment for receiving donations.

In Europe, you can order foods from 31,000 restaurants using BCH when your orders come from the online food ordering company (Takeaway).

With such acquisitions and use across a diverse range of industries, there is a huge potential for growth in the near future. 

Bitcoin Cash also thrives on other factors such as the collective performance of the whole decentralized finance world. 

A rally on the part of parent crypto in 2021 led to the patronage of other altcoins which include Bitcoin Cash. 

If the market remains positive and there is mass adoption of cryptocurrencies and their blockchain technologies, BCH will be affected positively in the process.

With that said, BCH is reaching milestone trade volumes which was not expected before and has demonstrated that it can survive on its own as part of the crypto boom and quality of its coin.  

Price Predictions of Bitcoin Cash in 2021 and Beyond

Experts at Coin Switch believe that there will be several developments in the lead up to 2025. Coin Switch has opined that the future price of BCH will always depend on the performance of Bitcoin and will trade on the credibility of the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin Cash will have a trading price of $5,891 by the end of 2025.

According to Wallet Investor, Bitcoin Cash could begin 2022 with a maximum trading price of $1,270, go through resistance and close August at $880.58. 

Experts at Wallet Investors see BCH closing 2022 with a trading price of $1,418. The asset will have a price of $1,667.04 by the end of 2023, trade for a coin at $2,080.20 at the end of 2024. By 2025, it will have soared to $2,389.65.

Digital Coin Price has opined that Bitcoin Cash will increase substantially in price to $805.73 by the end of 2021, trade at $988.09 in 2022, end 2023 with a price of $1,115.39, soar to a price of $1,387.77 by 2024 and to $1,602.50 in 2025, $2,007.57 in 2026, $2,155.60 in 2028 and a previous achieved price milestone of $2,533.48 by 2030.

Long Forecast sees the future of BCH as bearish. Long Forecast predicts Bitcoin Cash to end the year with a trading price of $780. It will go through a bearish period which will pull its price back to $359 by the close of 2022. In 2023, the digital asset will be trading at $560. A price of $245 will be the closing price of Bitcoin Cash for 2024. The asset will outperform the previous year with a trading price of $350 to close out 2025.

According to Trading Beasts, BCH will end December 2021 at $503.41. BCH will have a trading price of $615.498 in 2022. The crypto asset in 2023 will have a price of $936.83 and close 2024 with a trade price of at least $1,099.18.

Crypto Ground foresees a bearish end to Bitcoin Cash at the end of the year with a trade price of $420.85. 

$1,471.06 will be the trade price of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in 2023 after a forecasted market crash. 

As per the forecast and algorithmic analysis, the price of 1 Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will be around $2,566.4534 in 2025.

Coin Price Forecast is going to have a price of $1,683 for the year ended 2022, trade for a coin at $2,170 in 2023, maintain its bullishness and test new price milestones at $4,308 in 2029 and in the next 10 years hit new price highs of $4,903 in 2032.

Stanko Iliev of Invezz.com has predicted a surge in the price of BCH if it reaches $750 in the long-term and a huge drop in trading price consistently hovers around the $600 mark.

Conclusion

Any novice investor who decides to get into crypto trading and investing will have a relatively harder time finding the best possible digital asset which would bring them huge returns on their investments.

This is because there are thousands of digital coins and tradable tokens which offer the same functions of helping users send and receive payments over the internet in a decentralized manner (thus without the help of intermediaries such as banks, clearinghouses and insurance companies).

What makes Bitcoin Cash a buy is that it meets the basic requirements several traders, investors and business organizations ask of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology as a whole which is scalability. 

According to Deloitte, there are several business organizations which have opined that blockchain technology and digital currencies can go a long way in easing the current bureaucratic nature of business systems which does not provide effective and efficiency of work.

But the problem most organizations found with blockchain is that it is slow due to congested networks which lead to huge fees.

Bitcoin Cash through the upgrade of the hard fork in 2017 has made it possible for several transactions to be completed in seconds.

Such a feature is unavailable for BTC since its fans want to maintain it as a store of value while BCH fans want to maintain it as a medium of exchange for transactions.

If we are to go by the prediction of Crispus Nyaga, BCH is a buy in the long term. The Investing Cube analyst believes that the digital coin will rise to a trading price of at least $1,000 before the end of 2021.