@Mr-Zwets 26 December 2024 more from that month

Bitcoin Cash 2024 Year-in-Review

*Continuing the series, here’s my yearly recap article of everything important that happened in Bitcoin Cash over the last year. The series now covers 2018-2024 following Bitcoin Cash on its rise to peer-to-peer cash for the world.* **Earlier articles in the series** The year 2018 in Bitcoin Cash https://read.cash/@Mr-Zwets/the-year-2018-in-bitcoin-cash-a9d8e67c The year 2019 in Bitcoin Cash https://read.cash/@Mr-Zwets/the-year-2019-in-bitcoin-cash-df91efd0 The year 2020 in Bitcoin Cash so far: a detailed history [updated] https://read.cash/@Mr-Zwets/the-year-2020-in-bitcoin-cash-so-far-a-detailed-history-updated-c0066ed5 The year 2022 in Bitcoin Cash https://read.cash/@Mr-Zwets/the-year-2022-in-bitcoin-cash-dfc46ff7 The year 2023 in Bitcoin Cash https://read.cash/@Mr-Zwets/the-year-2023-in-bitcoin-cash-d0122798 So let's get to reviewing the past year, 2024, to continue the series! Launches & Announcements January started off strong in Bitcoin Cash with the Beta launch of the BCH Guru prediction platform. The platform allows users to predict future prices of different cryptocurrencies and place FURU bets on the final outcome. The dapp enables user to utilize their Guru NFTs as avatars for their predictions. After this initial launch there's been a host of updates adding personal stats, a community dashboard, etc. Special about the Guru prediction platform is that is uses CashConnect to connect your wallet, a new protocol which aims to improve the security of interacting with BCH smart contracts. CashConnect is still in Alpha stage and only supported in Cashonize.

The Riften labs team behind the Cauldron DEX also started January off strong with big improvements like adding wallet connect support to their CashTokens DEX and featuring on the Bitcoin.com podcast. But most prominent of all was the announcement of their next big CashTokens project: Moria Money (MUSD), a BCH-backed stablecoin. https://youtu.be/DyyA-onVU1Y

Towards the end of January there was also the launch of the mint of the 'Pepi' NFT project on CashTokens, built with the open-source tooling of the Cash-Ninjas project last year. https://pepi.cash/ Bridge the NFTs! In February, as a part of the Cash-Ninjas project, a one-way bridge to bridge the Reapers NFTs from 'SmartBCH' to CashTokens was developed! This tech allows for NFT collections to be easily rescued from the collapsed BCH sidechain which had become a ghost-chain. The goal of the effort was also to be a 1st introduction for SmartBCH users to the Cashtokens ecosystem by allowing to bridge their old NFTs. https://ninjas.cash/ https://reapers.cash/

After the bridging tech being pioneer by the Reapers, many other SmartBCH collections followed suite. First Paytaca used the tech to build a 'bridge portal' to bridge their Punk Apes, Gambling Apes Club and Spice NFTs. After some time the RATs and puffer NFTS from SmartBCH started bridging to CashTokens also. https://bridgeportal.cash/

Tokenaut After the introduction of many new different NFT collections on CashTokens, I launched Tokenaut.cash, an overview website for the different NFT collections on CashTokens. The bridged collections became some of the biggest NFT projects on CashTokens. https://tokenaut.cash/ Tokenaut also has a 'DeFi' and 'Dapps' page to help showcase the new smart contracts applications being built on Bitcoin Cash.

Wallet Innovation All of the main Bitcoin Cash wallets had big developments over the year, they won't be covered exhaustively but here are some of the main highlights from Paytaca, Zapit, Selene, Cashonize and Electron Cash: Paytaca released the Paytaca merchant map, the Paytaca marketplace and a built-in P2P exchange! Further, the team did a lot of on-the-ground local adoption work for BCH to get it used in commerce. The Paytaca team also created a BCH-powered vending machine.

Zapit also had a busy year: the team released a built-in P2P exchange, a rewards program with their new $ZRP CashToken, a 'zapy birds' Gaming NFT integration, multi-chain support and a Zapit web wallet.

The Selene wallet got many improvements from faster wallet scanning on import and stability fixes to sweeping CashStamp paper wallets. However, the most widely shared innovation probably was the introduction of user activity stats within the wallet. Here you can see the rising stats shared by a Selene user:

Cashonize got fully rewritten from the ground up to have a solid foundation and to be built for cross-platform support. There is now a Cashonize Desktop version & android APK. Cashonize also finally got a landing page:

Lastly, Electron Cash: the mobile version got upgraded with CashTokens support and the desktop version got support for through reusable-payment address (RPA) support. The creation of RPA wallets is currently only a feature for advanced users who understand the privacy specifics. Smart Contract Tooling During 2024 the BCH smart contract tooling saw big improvements: in January Bitauth IDE v1.0.0 got released which serves as an incredible tool for BCH contract developers. Further CashScript playground update to support debugging with the Bitauth IDE. Later in the year CashScript v0.10.0 came out after several @next releases. Also, Spedn was revived and now supports the new Bitcoin Cash upgrades like native introspection & CashTokens but instead of going BCH-only it focuses on multi-chain support with compiler targets for BTC, XEC, etc.

Halving In April Bitcoin Cash underwent a halving which reduced the miner reward to 3.125 BCH per block. Shortly after this event BCH reach its high of the year at 685$/BCH presumably mainly driven by expectations and excitement around the halving. Bitcoin.com News covered this in an article "Bitcoin Cash Undergoes Halving Event, Sets Stage for May Upgrade". https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-undergoes-halving-event-sets-stage-for-may-upgrade/ Hijacking Bitcoin & Roger Ver Arrest Beginning of April is also when Roger Ver released his long-awaited book on Bitcoin history and the blocksize wars. The book was met with incredibly positive reactions from everyone in Bitcoin Cash and as expected, with some mixed reactions from maximalists. Later that month, Ver was arrested in Spain on tax evasion charges and had to stay in the county under some kind of house arrest. Later in the year it became clear they wanted to extradite him to the US where he could face up to 109 years maximum prison sentence. All this on the charge of not paying enough taxes on his Bitcoin holdings when he renounced his US citizenship in 2014.

ABLA Activation That brings us to May 15th and Bitcoin Cash's yearly scheduled hard fork upgrade. Locked-in in November was the CHIP for an '*adaptive blocksize limit algorithm*' also know as ABLA for short. The nickname of the upgrade became 'Jessica' (after a certain Jessica Alba super model). ABLA finally gets rid of a hard-coded limit on the blocksize, which has been so detrimental to the progress of Bitcoin and the cause of incredible set back. The ABLA upgrade had a lot public awareness, the most of any Bitcoin Cash upgrade (including CashTokens). This might have been in part due to the Jessica branding, but certainly also in part due to the timing with the release of Hijacking Bitcoin and the blocksize being a topic of discussion again and lastly also due to efforts from the community to communicate the upgrade effectively, like in the video below: https://youtu.be/YkkzIjZQNH0 BCH Bliss 2024 After a few years of not having a single BCH conference (partly due to COVID), there was finally another Bitcoin Cash conference, and this time in Europe! The 'Bliss' conference had been strategically scheduled for May 14th and 15th so the activation of the ABLA upgrade would be part of the event! The conference used Jessica NFTs as conference tickets and had a 60-ish attendees, all displaying their NFT in their CashTokens wallet to enter the conference hall. As one of the attendees I can personally say it was an incredible time and one of my favorite things ever. Steve documented his adventure of attending BCH Bliss 2024 and made a wonderful video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIezqwZZxvg I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker for the event with my talk on *"The CashTokens ecosystem after 1 year"*, which reviews the last year... seems to be a trend. Just like all the talk of the event you can find the recording on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIhQKQ4efnQ Launch at Bliss! Badger.Cash, a project which earns you tokens for staking Bitcoin Cash, was launched and released at bliss! The tokens were later used as a discount to mint collectible Badger NFTs. Notable is also the fact that these new smart contract apps all leverage CashTokens and WalletConnect. https://badgers.cash/

More Apps & Dapps In the months that followed Bliss many more application launched, I'll quickly go over them, but will add links to find more details: Fundme.Cash which is a new BCH crowdfunding platform, a simple token burner app, Future BCH coupon markets for staking BCH, BCH-XMR atomic swaps in BasicSwap, PurelyPeer which is an app for BCH treasure hunts, cashstamps which are claimable BCH paper wallets, the Paytaca non-custodial telegram tipping bot and bQuest which allows to buy South African mobile credit. https://fundme.cash/ https://www.tokenburner.cash/ https://futurebitcoin.cash/ https://basicswapdex.com/ https://purelypeer.cash/ https://stamps.cash/#/ https://bquest.cash/

CashTokens Awareness Over the course of the year there were also efforts to communicate the new token capabilities of Bitcoin Cash to a wider audience, the best example of which is probably the 'Road to CashTokens' video by John Moriarty of the Bitcoin Out Loud YouTube channel. This effort was funded through crowdfunding on the Fundme.cash platform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0jeLBJOr8Y Podcasts An important part of the increased CashTokens awareness efforts were also the multiple different BCH podcasts, a sign of a healthy and engaged community! There is the 'BitcoinCash Podcast' with twitch livestream, the General Protocols spaces on X and recently the new 'fiendish & friends' run by FiendishCrypto. This variation covers a breath of highly technical and beginner friendly content.

New Tokens Over the year a bunch of new token projects were also created, most notably the AFOF token of 'A Fifth of Gaming', the fiendish token, the ZRP Rewards token by Zapit and the Badger coins of Badgers.cash. The 'BCMR' metadata standard clearly won out over the alternative CRC20 metadata standard for CashTokens. Unfortunately also the CRC20 focused DEX Fex.Cash and related projects (donation.cash and FairMeme) all became inactive, presumably because it did not gain traction.

Growth of Existing Apps BCH Bull had a great year in 2024. In April the BCH Bull celebrated "over 21,000 smart contracts, with 360k BCH in volume (80 million USD) and has an all-time-high TVL of 24k BCH (14 million USD)." and by October there were already more than 26,000 smart contracts created totaling over 500k BCH in volume. Over the course of the year they introduced 'shorting' to the platform, marking an important milestone. https://x.com/BCH_BULL/status/1841363134872993929 https://x.com/BCH_BULL/status/1810271750434795875 Cauldron DEX also saw significant growth ended the year with just short of 1 million smart contract interaction! Note that one swap can interact with 50 or more micro pools, but this number remains very impressive. The Cauldron DEX also saw big improvements in the UI and a new 'Tokens' page with TVL stats for different CashTokens.

VM Limits & Bigints During the year, Jason Dreyzehner updated his VM-limits CHIP to be proposed for the 2025 BCH network upgrade together with a new proposal to add BigInts to Bitcoin Cash, serving as a natural extension for the VM-Limits. Notable about the 2 CHIPs was the extensive testing and bench marking suite, this also served as a security check for developers implementing these new Bitcoin Cash consensus rules. As per the CHIP timeline, stakeholder statements were collected from October 1st. There was very high engagement and participation from stakeholders in giving feedback, which was overwhelmingly positive and supportive for both proposals.

Upgrades Paying Dividends The Bitcoin Cash network upgrades all have a significant development, deployment and ecosystem rollout cost. The costs happen partly before activation and shortly afterwards when the ecosystem needs to upgrade. The benefits of these upgrades pay dividends over time, for some upgrades rather fast (like for CashTokens) for others much more slowly (like ABLA, P2SH32, SighashUtxos, consensus enforced transaction versions, ...). It's an important sign of health and long term thinking that Bitcoin Cash can rollout changes and bear the costs, and only see the benefit of those changes pay of slowly over time. Even if the new VM limits aren't widely utilized soon after activation, the changes will continue to pay dividends year after year after year. Of course we should discount benefits too far in the future, but looking back we'll be very glad with the compounded benefits!

Flipstarter Also in 2024, Flipstarter played a crucial role for the sustainability of common infrastructure and tooling in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem. The Verde team and the Knuth both got funded for their plans to update their respective full node software to support the planned BCH Network upgrade. CashScript was also funded for continued development for 2024-2025. We also saw important new initiatives being funded for the application layer like the development of an Electron Cash plugin to add BCH WalletConnect support. Further, there was also a Flipstarter for BCHC, a fork of BCHN with built-in Chronik indexer.

BCH WalletConnect BCH WalletConnect has only gained momentum throughout the year with more and more dapps using it. The significance of a standardized, inter-operable way for dapps and wallets to interact is hard to overstate. Both for developers and users this provides a much nicer experience. The network effect of BCH WalletConnect grows with each dapp and each wallet, which was limited to 3 wallets. Now there's also an alpha release for an Electron Cash WallectConnect plugin which will add a very important wallet 4th wallet to this list of wallets with BCH WalletConnect.

Meanwhile in BTC... Over the year 2024 we saw the covenant discussions in BTC gaining more traction with many different proposals adding fire to the discussions. There were quite a number of BTC developers who mentioned being jealous of the covenant and introspection capabilities of Bitcoin Cash and our smart contract tooling (CashScript, Bithauth IDE). This also came up in a BTC/BCH crossover discussion (bitcoin-tech dev forum) showing bitcoin developers from the different forks can have mature knowledge exchange. More broadly in BTC, it was notable that Ordinals disappeared from the public discussion, that there was an increasing amount of infighting despite (or maybe because of?) the sharply rising price. Besides being more popular as an investment asset, there remains no viable plan to scale BTC in a non-custodial way. The failure of the Lightning Network to live up to most of its promises also became much more widely accepted, indicating a shift in the Overton window.

2025 Lock-in & 2026 Proposals November 15th the VM Limits and BigInts CHIPs by Jason both locked in for activation in 2025. These continue the Bitcoin Cash focus on high-impact smart contract updates. With the 2025 upgrade finalized, Jason published his proposals for 2026 to start feedback and discussion on three CHIPs: Bounded loops, OP_EVAL and a new output type 'Pay-to-Script' (P2S). The bounded loops proposal was already written in 2021 but was updated to take into account the new VM Limits and to be proposed for activation in 2026. OP_EVAL and P2S are new CHIPs but not exactly new ideas: the former stemming from atleast 2011. Bitcoin Cash is incredibly fortunate to have world class researchers with Jason and others working on the Bitcoin Cash script system. XO Wallet General Protocols (GP) announced the native wallet project called 'XO Wallet' and related 'XO stack' which is now in active development. The XO website lays out the goal of the project and how the XO stack can serve as general tooling for the BCH ecosystem powering future apps and other wallets. https://xo.cash/ The idea of BCH native wallets is a wallet which understand all Bitcoin Cash smart contracts and transactions, including those with multiple complex spending conditions or which involve multiple parties cooperating. The 'Native BCH Wallet' concept is not fully defined or worked out but instead an area of ongoing research and a North Star of BCH wallet devs. GP organized discussions and working groups related to Native BCH Wallets for working towards this long-term goal.

Argentina Conference & Milei Mid October there was also the BCH Argentina conference, which was also highlighted by Bitcoin.com news: "Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Conference 2024 Coming to Buenos Aires, Argentina in October". https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-bch-conference-2024-coming-to-buenos-aires-argentina-in-october/ Bitcoin Cash has a very active community in Argentina, fueled further by the election of Javier Milei last year. Milei is one of the world's most prominent libertarians and free-market advocates. BTC 100k Impossible to ignore in December of 2024 is the Bitcoin ATH of 100k USD. This brought Bitcoin discussion back to the mainstream, right in time for Christmas family dinner 😅.

Roger Ver on Tucker After months of being outside the public eye Roger Ver made a huge comeback by talking about his arrest and 'Hijacking Bitcoin' on the Tucker Carlson podcast. The episode has just short of half a million views on Youtube at the time of writing, not counting other platforms like X. Roger talked about his politically-motivated persecution and the important initiative freeRogerNow.org. https://youtu.be/dbLHXOipQN4 https://www.freerogernow.org/ The timing with the BTC all time high, and the general interest about Ver's arrest couldn't have been better to also bring attention to the hijacking of Bitcoin. Ver's book and his ideas more broadly were the cause of a lot of debates again, bringing the Bitcoin split of 2017 back into the conversation in a powerful way.

Moria Money Early December the highly anticipated Moria Protocol launched on Bitcoin Cash. This marks the 1st decentalized stablecoin to launch on BCH. Importantly: the MUSD stablecoin launched as an Alpha test run, running util May 15th 2025. The protocol will likely be improved and extended after the VM Limits upgrade actives on Bitcoin Cash. Moria Money took the spotlight in the CashTokens ecosystem, even being featured on bitcoindotcom news: "Bitcoin Cash Welcomes Its First Stablecoin on Cashtokens". Broader, the Moria Protocol and its borrowing and stability mechanism was actively being discussed already in the months leading up to the launch. Moria is a great example of what kind of advanced smart contract apps can be built with CashTokens. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-welcomes-its-first-stablecoin-on-cashtokens/

The Return of BCHD The effort to bring the BCHD full node back in consensus and update the related tooling for the CashTokens and ABLA upgrade came to completion towards the end of the year. Not only is this good for BCH full-node diversity (and network health more broadly) but it's especially important for application developers who liked building with the BCHD GRPC to get blockchain data and live event updates. With the return of BCHD, the BCH GO library is also back up-to-date, as well as the Meep script debugger and the BCHD-powered blockexplorer! Lastly, BCHD also has a built-in SLP indexer, which already sparked developer interest to finally create an SLP -> CashTokens migration, for example for SPICE token.

Price Action Price-wise the year 2024 was also good, starting 2024 at only roughly 260$ and ending the year at 450$/BCH. The highest price during the year was 630$/BCH, likely due to the anticipation of the halving. However unlike BTC and ETH, Bitcoin Cash remained far from its ATH, and even from the symbolic 1000$ threshold of the more recent May 2021 high. The BCH/BTC ratio slightly worsened, from 0.005 to 0.004 BTC per BCH, during the year however did ratio did recover up to 0.01 or 1%. For 2025 it'll be very important BCH can do better on the price front, so it can climb the ladder on coinmarketcap, and improve upon its position (currently #19). Being consistently in the top 15 would be a good minimum goal to set.

Year in Review https://read.cash/@Mr-Zwets/the-year-2022-in-bitcoin-cash-dfc46ff7#year-in-review After a rough 2021 and 2022 in Bitcoin Cash, I crowned 2023 as the best-year-yet in last year's article. I think we can confidently say that 2024 now deserves this title, introducing a streak that we can hopefully maintain going forwards. 2024 was a year of maturing for many BCH projects and the CashTokens ecosystem as whole, but also a year with major introduction of new projects and dapps. Bitcoin Cash continues its track record with a solid, impactful network upgrade activating, and locking-in the next one. We saw significant improvements in developer tooling and options, which will serve as a foundation for the future. There were also so missed opportunities: CashTokens did not really reach into the broader cryptocurrency awareness or user base. Similarly, it has been difficult to attract outside developer talent or per-existing teams/businesses from other chains. This highlights that it is still too early for them. We will have to get significant traction from within the BCH Builders and projects first before we can hope to attract outside interest or win back interest from companies like Bitcoin.com. *Did I miss anything important or think I got something wrong? Agreed of how I evaluated the year 2024 for Bitcoin Cash? Please let me know in the comments, I welcome all feedback!*