The year 2023 in Bitcoin Cash

Continuing the series, here’s the yearly recap article of everything important that happened in Bitcoin Cash over the last year. The series now covers 2018-2023 (with a gap for 2021) following Bitcoin Cash on it’s rise to peer-to-peer cash for the world.

What happened before, in the year ... in Bitcoin Cash

• The year 2018 in Bitcoin Cash

• The year 2019 in Bitcoin Cash

• The year 2020 in Bitcoin Cash so far: a detailed history [updated]

• The year 2022 in Bitcoin Cash

• The year 2023 in Bitcoin Cash (current article)

Buckle up, 2023 was quite the ride!

CashTokens Toolchain

Bitcoin Cash ended 2022 with the CashTokens lock-in date on November 15th, when the proposed upgrades (CHIPs) got accepted and activated on chipnet: the testnet to stage BCH network upgrades. To actually start developing with the new CashTokens features, a whole tool-chain had to get extended first, and that's what happened over the coming months.

This effort to upgrade the toolchain started at the end of 2022 with Libauth, the low level speed-focused Jasvascript library developed by Jason Drayzehener (the CashTokens author), which introduced CashTokens support to the alpha version. Next, in december '22 still , the Fulcrum indexers released a new version which supported serving CashTokens information and alongside the mainnet-js library got upgraded by Pat and released as v1.0 with CashTokens support. With some of the core pieces ready for CashTokens development on Chipnet, this brought us to the start of 2023.

CashTokens on Chipnet

2023 started with people utilizing these tools to start prototyping new applications! Early January I (Mathieu G.) was the first person to take advantage of these new tools to publicly start developing a minimum-viable CashTokens wallet, and was doing so very publicly in an attempt to garner interest from other developers. Alongside the wallet the first CashTokens explorer was also in development. It is exciting to truly pioneer innovation, that's also how it felt playing around with the BCMR metadata-standard to actually add a name and an icon to the CashTokens on Chipnet!

Community Learning

Alongside the development of the toolchain and first basic applications, there was also a lot of community learning going on. Discussions about how CashTokens compared to other token systems, like SLP and ERC20, and discussions about how BCH's smart contract capabilities now compare to those of Ethereum. The toolchain got further upgraded by ChainGraph adding support for CashTokens. This was a super important addition as Chaingraph allows to make complex queries for example, to get all the addresses holding a certain CashToken.

Let the Countdown Begin!

Mid-February, in a much awaited move, Coin.dance added a countdown to the Bitcoin Cash page counting from 90days down towards the CashTokens upgrade!

Flipstarter Funding the Ecosystem

With the upgrade coming closer there was the clear need for a CashTokens explorer with BCMR metadata support, luckily Salem Kode took the initiative launching a crowd funder and got the support to successfully fund-raise the project. Rosco and I also finished the work on upgrading CashScript for CashTokens, releasing a beta version, 2 months in advance of the actual activation date which represent the final piece in the tool-chain to being able to build smart contract applications! Flipstarter continued to prove itself as an essential tool in the ecosystem with the crowdfunder for continued development on mainnet-js and Electron Cash flipstarter to add CashTokens support to the desktop wallet which also got successfully funded.

DeFi on BCH

Although CashTokens took much of the spotlight, consistent improvement were also made to BCH Bull, the in-house platform by General Protocols for AnyHedge smart contracts. In February General protocols announced that over 43,000 BCH got locked in AnyHedge smart contracts since October 2022. Another milestone for the protocol was reached in March with a listing an the DeFi metric site 'DeFi Lama'. AnyHedge now had over $1,200,000 TVL that same month, according to DeFi Lama.

Then mid-april BCH BULL had its production release introducing "2x the contract size, 3x the contract duration, approx 30% cheaper fees, additional asset (CNY), premium tracker and language localization!" according to the announcement.

First CashTokens Apps in Development

The push for CashTokens infrastructure and tooling was sorely needed, however with this focus on tooling some people were worried about the lack of announcement for big projects building on top of CashTokens. A first sign of a big CashTokens project in the works came with Paytaca's demo mid-April showcasing connecting the Paytaca wallet to participate in a CashTokens NFT minting contract to mint 'cat' NFTs.

Further announcements stayed out until May 1st with the announcement of the BCH Guru project, a collectible NFT project on CashTokens planning to make a price prediction app. The Guru project was an important part in building anticipation for the CashTokens network upgrade with their announcement song and countdown to the upgrade.

Together with the announcements of the first CashTokens projects there was also a big increase in the information, content and marketing around CashTokens. The BCH Podcast hosted by Jeremy, was incredibly consistent with having guests on to talk about the upcoming upgrade and everything else happening in the crypto-scene, for example the BRC-20 drama of how fungible tokens using the ordinals protocol were added to Bitcoin. This also served as a great way to contrast what BTC was doing versus what BCH was focusing on.

The day before the mainnet launch of CashTokens, Electrum Cash released a beta version with CashTokens support in anticipation of the mainnet activation! The Paytaca team also released an update to their browser extension wallet adding the capability to receive CashTokens and added 'PaytacaConnect' which allows the extension to interact with smart contract web applications (dapps).

Activation Day

Community marketing efforts had been ramping up with podcast episodes, countdowns, a few high profile articles and a celebration upgrade stream on twitch! Development efforts had been ramping up too, to get the 3 different wallets compatible with CashTokens and ready for mainnet. The CashTokens activation day went without any issue on the protocol level. There were some hiccups on the application side, Cashonize, using mainnet-js, was not properly displaying tokens for mainnet which lead to some emergency debugging.

On Activation day we saw the launch of the first project built on the new CashTokens functionality with the 'Emerald DAO' project by BitcoinCashAutist. It launched on the upgrade day itself and utilized the brand new Paytaca-connect functionality to connect your paytaca browser extension wallet to the Emerald DAO Dapp to lock up BCH and Mint an Emerald NFT!

The CashTokens launch day is also the genesis for the DogeCash meme-token which got created in the first hour or so after launch. Besides CashTokens related stuff, the upgrade day also marked the reveal and beta release of the Selene Wallet. A brand new BCH-only wallet with great focus on usability and with a strong focus on BCH specific features.

Despite the very positive community sentiment and technical advances the price had stagnate around only 120$ since the beginning of the year. So any price-pump on the activation turned out to be hopium even though the BCH fundamentals got a lot better.

Start of the CashTokens Ecosystem

The Paytaca team had also prepared their own project to utilize with the PaytacaConnect functionality of their browser namely the Bitcats NFT Collection! They revealed the project a few days after the CashTokens upgrade and just like the Emerald Dao it used the new CashTokens features in CashScript for their project. This demonstrates a trend for future BCH dapps: wallet connect + cashscript smart contract.

An unfortunate thing that happened soon after the CashTokens launch is that impersonators copied the open source code of 'my CashTokens webwallet' and launched fake versions of the wallet in an attempt to steal people's fund. Because of this my webwallet had to urgently get a clear brand and domain-name. Luckily for me, Jason Dreyehner, the author of the CashTokens spec, came to help out! When working out the best course of action and deciding on a new brand Jason suggested 'Cashonize' which I loved right away! A few days later my webwallet finally had a clear brand, after more than 5 months of development...

Pieces Coming Together

Two weeks after the CashTokens launch, Paytaca revealed their CashTokens roadmap related to the Bitcats project: First they wanted to finish proper support for CashTokens in their wallet, then they wanted to develop and NFT marketplace, which is an essential piece for actually allow the bitcats NFTs to be traded and lastly they planned to build a CashTokens airdrop tool.

Later that week, a CashTokens marketplace already appeared with the launch of Tapswap. Tapswap is a non-custodial marketplace for CashTokens so it allows the buying and selling of both fungible and non-fungible CashTokens! Tapswap was the third dapp to leverage PaytacaConnect to allow for a great user experience linking an application to your wallet. Tapswap functioned as an enabler for the nascent CashTokens ecosystem: featuring the bitcats and emerald DAO, allowing people to trade and collect them, as well as the other user-created tokens.

June 1st, 2 weeks after the launch of the CashTokens ecosystem there was the highly anticipated launch of the BCH Guru NFTs. The project sold out their first wave of 2,000 NFTs in less than 24 hours! The surrounding hype also served as a very positive environment for Tapswap with much trading activity taking place.

The biggest drawback of PaytacaConnect, used by TapSwap, the Bitcats and the Emerald DAO is the lock-in to a custom integration which only works with the paytaca browser extension. Realizing this shortcoming, Pat launched a flipstarter campaign to design and implement a WalletConnect V2 implementation in the beginning of June. Such a general wallet connect implementation that can be implemented by multiple wallet and isn't specific to just browser extension wallets is an essential piece of infrastructure for dapps! This way many different wallets (and all their users!) can interact with different smart contract applications without needing being reliant on any specific wallet, which allows users to easily switch or use multiple different ones.

Price pump

Any effect of all these developments on price remained absent, with the BCH price being even on a bit of a decline since the start of the year, from 125$ to 105$. This changed spectacularly on the last week of June when the price almost 3X'ed up to a high of 305$, stabilizing around 220$. Crypto prices work in mysterious ways. This could be seen as the long awaited 'CashTokens pump' even though fundamentals probably did have nothing to do with it.

AMM DEXes

On July 1st Cauldron DEX launched, with 1 trading pair: BCH-SOCK, their own token which is redeemable for real-world socks. The dapp uses a built-in webwallet similar to BCH Bull platform.

Besides Cauldron there was also another AMM DEX released called Fex.cash, instead of the BCMR metadata standard it focused on CRC20 tokens. CRC20 is a tokenstandard on top of CashTokens which introduces a squattable name system for token-names. This way the protocol incentives claiming popular names (squatting) with the hopes of being to resell them later. The CRC20 standard was something specific to projects and builders in the Chinese/Eastern BCH ecosystem but there was pretty much no outreach or collaboration with the rest of the CashTokens ecosystem which was building upon the BCMR metadata standard which doesn't have a squattable token-name gimmick.

End of June Paytaca delivered on their roadmap item to upgrade their mobile for CashTokens, with this achievement it was the first CashTokens app for mobile. In July Paytaca had more great news to share, they successfully finished a 450 k funding round! This makes them one of the best funded organizations in BCH without a doubt and enables them to expand the scope of their products. At the end of June there was also a big update from the Zapit team: version v0.8 introducing CashTokens support! This brought the total number of CashTokens compatible wallet to 4 already! Further, in July Selene Wallet had their launch in the Apple app store, allowing IOS users to also use the new BCH only wallet!

$Cash Token Drama

There was also some drama over the summer, because of a paid BitcoinDotCom "press release" promotion article for a CashToken called $Cash, confusingly. Although it had nothing to do with the protocol itself, the token tried to position itself like ORDI in the ordinals ecosystem, a token without use but which is seen as the face of the token-ecosystem. In a promo video they claimed it would make sense for $Cash to have 1 to 10% of the value of BCH.

Luckily the BCH community's immune system kicked in, like an over-trained muscle to get the article removed, and warn everybody about the misleading pump-and-dump project. $Cash was one of the first tokens created following the CRC20 standard reflecting bad upon the creators, as it was not clear whether they were associated.

BCH Day

August 1st, which is the Bitcoin Cash anniversary (a.k.a. BCH Day), the second wave of 2,000 BCH Guru NFTs was released, at a slightly increased price. Also on BCH Day, I helped Itachu tokenize art in celebration of the Bitcoin Cash anniversary. Itachu is an independent digital artist who previously created the Reapers collection for SBCH and he released his first work on CashTokens with his graffiti artwork on BCH Day, this collaboration between the two of us would be the start of a whole journey for the remainder of the year.

Fungibles catching up

Early august was also the release of Tokenstork: an overview website for fungible CashTokens, with the intent to become a Coinmarketcap-like website. The first version of the website did not have price-information for the tokens, only information on the supply, tokenId and social media links for each token project. This was because of the simple reason that there was no DEX to get the token prices from, there was only Tapswap, the CashTokens marketplace.

This changed later in august, with the Cauldron Beta which allows for users to add trading pairs to the website by adding the initial liquidity, it also enabled users to create an additional micro-pools for already existing trading pairs and earn so fee percentage this way, a first example of yield on CashTokens.

Tooling tooling tooling

Over the summer, there was another big push to improve the tooling for devloping with CashTokens. For example mid July the BitCash library released version 1.0.0 which added CashTokens support to the library. It was the first python library to add CashTokens support, diversifying the tooling away from the heavy javascript focus. Another major piece of infrastructure: the BCH full node with integrated address indexer successfully completed a crowdfunder to bring the node back into consensus and have it validate the new network rules. This means catching up with the last 2 upgrades when it fell out of consensus. Notable was that an outside developer, OP_Return stepped up to take the initiative, and with this committed to maintaining the project for multiple years.

There were also some minor pieces of tooling I created like a BCMR Token explorer and a BCMR-generator. Then there was also the crowfunder for CashScript to upgrade the SDK for smart contract interactions by creating an 'advanced transaction builder' and to add reusable libraries to CashScript. Flipstarter once again proved itself as a vital tool for funding infrastructuree 'public goods' in the BCH space.

The next upgrade

With the CashTokens upgrade already being long in the pipeline and being locked-in in November, there had already been a lot of work on proposals for the next upgrade: the main contender became the adaptive blocksize limit CHIP by BitcoinCashAutist. The key idea was to solve the need for a small group of technical leaders to have to decide when and by how much to increase the blocksize on a continuous basis. Instead, an algorithm was fixed in advance which is slowly adaptive to the actual needs of the network, automatically allowing up-to a 2X increase in allowed throughput each year.

Tooling NFT Mint

On august 8th I teased to be working on something big with Itachu, later Josh Ellithorpe, the well known BCH dev who previously worked with Itachu on the Reapers project on SBCH had also joined the team. The reveal of this secretive project came on September 1st: Cash-Ninjas project.

The tooling to do an NFT minting contract on CashTokens was sorely missing, that's why the goal with the Cash-Ninjas from the beginning was to develop open-source for CashTokens NFT mints, for others to use. We designed our minting contract from the ground up and innovated on the approach of the Bitcats to enable a multi-threaded minting contract and reveal the art right at mint. The Cash-Ninjas roadmap included bridging the Reapers NFTs over from the dead SmartBCH sidechain to CashTokens!

Integrated Ecosystem

The launch of the Cash-Ninjas was delayed by exactly one week until October 8th, this gave enough time to finish the Wallet Connect functionality into the minting dapp. The day before the Cash-Ninjas mint I merged the work by Pat to integrate WalletConnect into Cashonize. With this, Cashonize was officially the first wallet on Bitcoin Cash supporting the general wallet Connect protocol with Pats BCH integration. The next day, October 8th, the Cash-Ninjas launched as a fully open-source project with Cashonize as the only compatible wallet.

Two days after the launch of the mint, there was already a second compatible wallet when Zapit added support for wallet connect. This was quickly followed by Paytaca, which added WalletConnect support a few days later. Now suddenly the 3 CashTokens wallets were all capable of of connecting to the CashNinjas website and minting NFTs! Additionally, a new NFT viewer got developed by Sploit, easily allowing users to follow the collections of friends, influencers or traders.

The ecosystem for fungible CashTokens also became a much more integrated towards the end of September when Tokenstork integrated Cauldron prices. With Cauldron as the price-source TokenStork could accurately calculate the total-value-locked (TLV) and the market cap for the different fungible CashTokens.

Bitcoin Cash Podcasts

In November General Protocols introduced 'General Protocols Spaces', a X/Twitter centered podcast with open discussion about all the latest developments on Bitcoin Cash. GP uploaded their first 10 Spaces to a YouTube playlist, and started making shorts for the different episodes to make the content more accessible.

The Bitcoin Cash podcast also stayed super consistent, getting to it's 100th episode in December, featuring Roger Ver! Here a screenshot of some of the latest episodes of the year:

November also marked half a year since the CashTokens activation date, here's a recap video of the ecosystem at that time:

Fast-paced Innovation

November 28th End of November I successfully completed flipstarter funding for Cashonize, which was already 11 months old at that point, but was still a hobby project. The objective of the crowfunder was a complete rewrite of the wallet, a bunch of new features and releasing a mobile version of the wallet. Innovation in the Cashonize wallet took a big leap forward early December when Jim released his new protocol 'CashRPC' and implemented it into Cashonize. The goal of CashRPC is to improve the security of walletConnect by allowing wallets to recognize smart contract templates, and to allow for more complex dapps.

There was also huge innovation with regards to CashScript, Pat succesfully developed great debug tooling for the Bitcoin Cash smart contract language. This allows smart contract developers to much easier understand what is going wrong when their smart contract transactions fail: it gives them a debug report of on which line the error is, it gives the develope a custom error message for the failing check and allows to easily check intermediate values either by using console.log statement or checking the stack trace in the BitauthIDE environment.

Rise WalletConnect apps

Early December the second item from the Paytaca roadmap got completed, instead of building a 2nd CashTokens marketplace they made an app for easy token-creation called 'CashTokens Studio'. The application released with both WallectConenct and PaytacaConnect.

Mid-December tapswap also added wallet connect to main site, this change was requested a lot by users who up until that point had to use a special beta version of Tapswap to be able to connect their Cashonize or Zapit wallet to the marketplace dapp. This further integrated the different pieces of the ecosystem making it much more accessible and convenient for users.

Additionally, in December there also was the release of 'early settlement' in the BCH Bull platform, a long awaited featured allowing users to exit their futures contract before the final settlement time.

CashConnect & BCH Guru

The launch of the beta of the BCH Guru price prediction platfrom was announced for January 5th of the new year, following a private alpha period. The beta platform has 3 assets: BTC, ETH and BCH and allows 2 players to play each other in a game of predicting future USD prices. For the beta users can only bet with FURU tokens, the fungible token of the Guru project which was airdropped to all BCH Guru holders based on their collection rarity earlier in the year.

The BCH Guru platform uses 'CashConnect' to let a wallet connect to their more advanced smart contract. CashConnect is the new CashRPC protocol with WalletConnect as the transport layer, so it uses some components similar to the walletConnect specification Pat designed but it uses libauth templates under the hood. December 29th CashConnect got merged into mainline Cashonize from Jim's fork, in preparation for the upcoming BCH Guru app which was planning to use the new feature! And with that the year 2023 got concluded, with high anticipation for 2024.

Year in review

2023 was the best year for BCH to-date. There was a huge amount of technical innovation and catching up with the rest of the crypto-ecosystem. BCH now has tooling to easily do an NFT Mint, it now has walletConnect to let users interact with dapps. CashScript, the BCH-specific smart contract language saw multiple major upgrades throughout the year. We saw multiple AMM DEXes launch on CashTokens and with Tapswap we saw a first non-custodial marketplace for CashTokens. And last but not least, we made industry wide innovation with CashConnect that can recognize smart contract templates, something the much more mature DeFi ecosystems don't even have.

Maybe most important of all, we see the beginning of a nicely integrated ecosystem were each piece builds upon the next, and where we squeeze the most out of our limited resources. In 2023 we saw a very unified community, all working towards innovation on CashTokens in a collaborative manner, aiming to grow the pie as a whole. CashTokens might well turn out to be the turning of the tide for BCH, from losing and hardship to winning and leading.

Price-wise the year 2023 was also good, starting 2023 at only roughly 100$ and ending the year at 260$ BCH. However zooming out BCH started the 2022 at 440$ (and had traded above 600$ just two months earlier) so the long term trend is stil very bad. The anticipation is there for the BCH miner halving less than 100 days into 2024 to have a great positive impact on the price.

Did I miss anything important or think I got something wrong? Agreed of how I situated the position of BCH towards the end? Please let me know in the comments, I welcome all feedback!