[Note: Since this article was published, Moeing has rebranded to "Smart Bitcoin Cash", or "SmartBCH" for short]

You’ve probably seen tweets, rumors, or vague announcements about the upcoming Moeing Chain. Something about a sidechain that has something to do with Ethereum compatibility on Bitcoin Cash, right?

It all sounds kind of exciting, but also very mysterious, especially with no official whitepaper to look at yet. What is it all really about? 

I’m here to clear up any misunderstandings, help people grasp what Moeing Chain is all about, and let people know why it’s great news for Bitcoin Cash. Without further ado, here are...

Seven Reasons You Should Be Excited for Moeing Chain

Moeing Chain Depends on and Builds Up Bitcoin Cash

Moeing Chain is a sidechain for Bitcoin Cash. Did I lose you already? Okay, let’s talk about sidechains.

A sidechain is an independent blockchain that has a special relationship with the main chain because of a two-way peg between the two. A two-way peg between Bitcoin Cash and Moeing Chain means that it will be possible to send an amount of BCH to a special locking script which will unlock the same amount of BCH on the Moeing sidechain and vice-versa. 

When Moeing Chain launches it is expected that the first gateway between the Bitcoin Cash and Moeing blockchains will be a federated two-way peg. Such a system is not quite trustless, but it will probably be good enough to get things started. 

Moeing developers are already getting input from Bitcoin Cash developers on how to create a completely trustless two-way peg between the two chains. Karol Trzeszczkowski and Tobias Ruck are confident that Bitcoin Cash scripting is sufficiently powerful to create such a gateway and Moeing developers are eager to have it built and implemented as soon as possible.

If Moeing is a separate blockchain, why does it need Bitcoin Cash at all? Can’t it just be its own thing like all the other blockchains that are cropping up all the time? 

With so many crypto projects out there and only so many people interested in cryptocurrencies, every new project seems to dilute the power that blockchain technology has to help people.

Instead of spreading crypto influence even thinner, Moeing Chain is going to leverage the existing power and potential of Bitcoin Cash. Moeing Chain is essentially bootstrapping itself into full functionality by being a sidechain to Bitcoin Cash. This crypto-symbiotic relationship between two impressive technologies will augment each of the two components and make the whole system extremely powerful.

Moeing Chain’s dependence on Bitcoin Cash will be manifested in multiple ways. Moeing’s blockchain will be secured by Moeing validators. Those validators will be chosen by Bitcoin Cash miners. The Bitcoin Cash miners will use the coinbase transactions in the blocks they mine to cast their votes for Moeing validators. One block mined on BCH will be equal to one vote. Bitcoin Cash miner voting will decide on Moeing validation nodes every “epoch” which is 2016 BCH blocks (about two weeks). Thus the Moeing Chain will be based on proof-of-work, but the work itself is offloaded onto (or perhaps borrowed from) the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

Miners will not be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. We expect miners to act selfishly. It’s part of the brilliance of blockchain technology. Miners will most likely set up their own Moeing validation nodes and vote for themselves so they can earn more transaction fees. At the very least we would expect miners to vote for validators friendly to them to share the profits. Either way, we can be sure that voting for Moeing validators will not be any sort of burden on Bitcoin Cash miners.

Moeing plans to diversify the voting process in a future hard fork. Eventually BCH holders will be able to stake their coins to vote for Moeing validators. Up to 50% of the voting could be done by BCH stakers. This would make the Moeing Chain a proof-of-work/proof-of-stake hybrid blockchain when that change gets implemented.

One of the most exciting things is that Moeing Chain will not have its own native token. Remember the idea is to not spread the crypto ecosystem even thinner than it already is. Just like Ethereum uses its own native token ETH for gas fees, Moeing Chain will use BCH for its gas fees. I would prefer to (and will in the rest of this article) call the BCH moved over to the Moeing Chain “MBCH” to make a distinction between the two.

Some of you who aren’t familiar with Ethereum might be wondering what gas fees are. On Ethereum gas fees are simply the transaction fees. No matter what tokens are being sent on Ethereum, all gas fees are paid in ETH. On Moeing Chain all gas fees will be paid in MBCH (more on that later). Moeing is leveraging the already-existing value of Bitcoin Cash. It won’t be necessary to pump some brand-new token. The only thing that will be pumped is Bitcoin Cash.

Moeing Chain Brings Smart Contracts and DeFi to Bitcoin Cash

I’m not saying Bitcoin Cash doesn’t already have smart contracts and DeFi. It does. However, at this point those applications on Bitcoin Cash are very fresh and just starting to bloom. 

The earliest Bitcoin Cash could have miner-validated tokens (important for many smart contract applications) is May 2022. And then Bitcoin Cash may not get additional opcodes (to make smart contract and DeFi applications easy) for another year after that! 

Can Bitcoin Cash wait that long to start attracting the kind of attention Ethereum and other DeFi protocols have been getting for a while now? That ship might sail before Bitcoin Cash can get all its ducks in a row. Smart contracts and DeFi on Ethereum have been going strong for quite a while and they are starting to go strong on other blockchains as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to get some of that action on Bitcoin Cash now instead of in a few years? Moeing Chain can make that happen.

You’ve probably heard that Moeing Chain is EVM and Web3 compatible. But what does that mean? EVM stands for “Ethereum Virtual Machine” and that’s what runs the Ethereum network. Moeing Chain will run what basically amounts to another instance of EVM with all of Ethereum’s abilities. Think about that. A sidechain of Bitcoin Cash that can do what Ethereum does. Are you getting excited yet?

Web3 is one of the most popular ways applications interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Developers will be able to use Web3 to interact with Moeing Chain as well. Think about this some more. A Bitcoin Cash sidechain will have all the familiar tools DeFi developers have come to expect. What new possibilities will be opened up?

With all the compatibility with these important tools, Moeing Chain will have the same capabilities and advantages Ethereum has, with all of its robust and complex smart contracting abilities, including everything needed for DeFi applications.

It’s important to recognize the significance of what this means for Bitcoin Cash and the crypto economy as a whole, which brings us to the next reason to be excited…

It's Trivial to Port Popular dApps Over to Moeing Chain

Ethereum, for all its capabilities, is drowning in fees these days. It is a victim of its own success. Due to the extremely high fees, many smart contract use cases are effectively impossible. And the ones that are thriving, like Uniswap, are prohibitively expensive for most people.

The market demand for those types of things doesn’t simply go away. Other projects lure that demand to their blockchains. The alarming possibility is that popular dApps could go to centralized or semi-centralized projects like Binance Smart Chain (BSC), which could hamper growth of true peer-to-peer blockchains. 

That’s where Moeing Chain comes in. Moeing Chain has the potential to absorb much of the demand for decentralized smart contract applications that are not being met on Ethereum or other blockchains. That means a whole host of users and use cases could be coming to a Bitcoin Cash sidechain in the near future!

Because Moeing is EVM and Web3 compatible, basically every application or wallet that runs on Ethereum can be tweaked slightly to run on Moeing Chain. Do you like Uniswap? Make a clone of it on Moeing Chain. Did you miss out on cheap Cryptokitties? Make some modifications and put it on Moeing Chain. Are you using the MetaMask wallet? Use that on Moeing Chain as well.

All Ethereum-based dApps, wallets, and other use cases will be easy to run on Moeing Chain. Ethereum is known to be very developer-friendly and that would also certainly be the case for Moeing Chain. That means a lot of talent and potential that isn’t being fully utilized on Ethereum due to high fees; or on BSC due to worries of centralization; could be coming to a sidechain of Bitcoin Cash. That’s fantastic news for global peer-to-peer digital cash!

You may be wondering why all these DeFi apps would come to Moeing when there are already other EVM-based competitors out there. You’re right to wonder, which leads into Moeing Chain’s specific niche and what may be the best reason of all to get excited about it.

Moeing Chain's EVM Will Be Fully Optimized from Top to Bottom

Have you ever driven a really nice car? I’m betting some of you have. Have you ever tried to repair or improve a really nice car while you’re driving it? My guess is the answer is no. Once a machine is up and running - especially a very complex multi-billion dollar machine - it is extremely difficult to work on. You would most likely have to shut it down first, then work on repairs, and finally activate it again. 

In this case Ethereum is the really fancy car. It drives pretty fast and it does amazing things. Many things can be improved on the go. There have been many improvements on Ethereum since it has started and many more improvements are planned. However other aspects of the design are so low-level in the architecture that Ethereum is stuck with those design choices for the long haul. You can’t just shut it off and park it for a time while you fix it.

Moeing Chain, however, is still on the factory floor. It can benefit from experimentation and the latest innovations at the lowest levels of its architecture since it’s not up and running yet. Other chains that are clones of Ethereum have simply forked what’s already out there, perhaps adjusting a thing or two, but nothing substantial. 

Moeing developers were not about to do the same ol’ thing again. They have something much more grand in mind. It turns out there are a number of low-level optimizations that can be done to to take scaling to the absolute limit and make the EVM really fly.

One of the major improvements in the world of hardware in the last decade is the addition of more and more cores in a CPU. But that doesn’t mean that everything the machine is running automatically benefits from the presence of multiple cores. Software has to be specifically tweaked to take advantage of hardware advances. 

Ethereum’s EVM has always been single-threaded, only able to process one command at a time. It doesn’t appear that that is ever going to change. But hardware these days can handle so much more. Imagine a grocery store that has dozens of checkout registers but only one line that’s ever actually open. That’s Ethereum’s EVM running on modern hardware.

Moeing Chain innovates by specifically optimizing the EVM for multi-core CPUs. Moeing leverages the inherent parallelism of modern hardware while keeping things the same for smart contract developers. The result is called "MoeingEVM" and it uses multi-threaded execution semantics. It’s essentially Ethereum on steroids.

MoeingEVM leverages two types of parallelism: the parallelism between consensus engine and transaction execution engine; and the parallelism among different transactions. This effectively utilizes the inherent parallelization in modern hardware. Going back to our grocery store analogy, it’s like finally hiring enough staff (or adding enough automation equipment) to open up all the checkout lines! Every customer can get through very promptly.

In addition to parallelization, there are certain speed-up methods used in some VM’s called ahead-of-time compilers or just-in-time compilers. Ethereum’s EVM, despite being the de facto smart contract standard, doesn’t have any of these compilers. 

To rectify that, Moeing Chain uses “MoeingAOT”, an ahead-of-time compiler that compiles EVM bytecode into native code and saves it into a library. Whenever a smart contract is run, the library file can be found and the native code can be executed very quickly. This will be especially important for the most popular smart contracts that are run very frequently.

Moeing developers also have their eyes on possible scaling solutions in the future if they ever reach the upper limits of hardware capabilities. You may have heard of the concepts of rollups and sharding. These are solutions being discussed for Ethereum and other chains and are starting to be implemented. Moeing has important optimizations for these scaling solutions, should they be necessary.

Rollups are basically what they sound like: many transactions rolled into one and executed together. The idea is that using them intelligently can significantly boost overall throughput. 

Unfortunately the way rollups are implemented on Ethereum requires a lot of resources to prove state transition. “MoeingRollup” can improve efficiency by making it possible to run those tasks natively. The result is that state can be proven easily.

Sharding is a way to split up a blockchain into multiple “shards” to increase overall throughput. It’s like having multiple blockchains, but they’re all working together one one cryptocurrency to boost transaction capacity. 

The main drawback of sharding - as it’s implemented on Ethereum, Polkadot, and others - is that it requires an intermediate chain for each shard to prove state to all the other shards. If all the shards have to communicate via an intermediate chain, the intermediate chain can quickly get bogged down. To get around this requirement, Moeing Chain can implement “MoeingLink” which allows shards to prove state to other shards without going through an intermediate chain.

Database design is a key area in which Moeing makes huge improvements. Ethereum uses a two-layer architecture for storage. To make things much more efficient, “MoeingADS” is a single-layer database architecture. MoeingADS is thus able to read and write to storage extremely quickly and is especially friendly to SSD.

Moeing developers did a benchmark test to see how many transactions per second MoeingADS could support. MoeingADS puts an upper bound on TPS because, no matter how fast everything else can go, the ultimate limitation is how fast the VM can read and write data to storage. 

The benchmark used a three-year-old MacBook Pro, with a 2.6GHz six-core i7 processor. The results were staggering.

MoeingADS handled over 26,000 transactions per second! If a standard transaction, like on Ethereum, costs 21,000 gas, then this benchmark would mean Moeing Chain could potentially consume over 8 billion gas in a 15-second block! Right now Ethereum can do approximately 30 transactions per second and consume 12.5 million gas per block. That’s a difference of multiple orders of magnitude!

It needs to be said that this particular benchmark test wasn’t running smart contracts, which are more costly to execute. But with the data above from a test run on three-year-old equipment, and data from a separate test on an eight-core machine that reached 40,000 transactions per second, Moeing developers are confident (and are advertising) that they can achieve 1 billion gas every 15 seconds.

Let's think about the implications of these intense optimizations Moeing has done on its EVM.

Those of us in the Bitcoin Cash community can get easily frustrated by those who, for whatever reason, cannot recognize the importance of large on-chain capacity for digital cash. The difference between Bitcoin Cash and other cryptos trying (or pretending) to be digital currency is stunning. That’s why we are confident that when digital peer-to-peer cash becomes extremely important for the average person, Bitcoin Cash will really be the only choice.

Now think of Moeing Chain, the blockchain that hopes to be the smart contract/DeFi counterpart and sidechain to Bitcoin Cash. Moeing Chain will have an absurd amount of on-chain capacity compared to the rest of the competition. And we already know that there is a huge demand for smart contract and DeFi applications!

Do you realize what this means? Those that are hungry for these types of blockchain applications and those that want to expand the accessibility and affordability of DeFi are going to have basically one option: Moeing Chain. Every dApp and use case on Ethereum or other chains suffering from high fees can be implemented on Moeing Chain for extremely low fees. Get your popcorn ready because it’s going to be quite a show!

Moeing Chain Will Lock Up a Lot of BCH

The utility Moeing Chain will bring to Bitcoin Cash is amazing just by itself. But it’s incredible to think about the effect Moeing Chain will have on BCH supply. The existence and usage of Moeing Chain will require a lot of locked-up BCH.

Remember how Moeing Chain won’t have it’s own new token, but will use MBCH (BCH moved to the Moeing sidechain) as its native token and to pay gas fees? Think about all the usage Moeing Chain could possibly get due to the intense demand for smart contracts and DeFi that’s causing all the high fees on other blockchains. Think about all the use cases that would be possible on Moeing Chain due to the incredible gas limit of 1 billion and the low fees that would facilitate. 

Now think about how much BCH will need to be locked up on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain and transferred over as MBCH on the Moeing Chain. We’re talking about A LOT of BCH, all taken out of the available supply.

Half of the gas fees on Moeing Chain will be paid to the Moeing validators. What about the other half, you ask? The other half of the gas fees will be burned. You read that right. Every single transaction and smart contract executed on Moeing Chain will permanently remove some amount of MBCH (and thus also BCH) from circulation.

Think of the ramifications of this fact. Even if Moeing Chain reaches a point where it is no longer growing and its usage is basically static, it would still require a constant infusion of BCH (turned into MBCH) for Moeing users to use for gas fees. This will put deflationary pressure on Bitcoin Cash.

Besides its use as a token to pay for gas fees, MBCH will also be the native token of Moeing Chain, just like how ETH is the native token for Ethereum. ETH has its uses outside of its utility as the gas token. It can be staked for different purposes, it can be used as a settlement token for contracts, and it can be used for many other things besides. Think of all the ETH on Ethereum being used for things other than gas fees on Ethereum. If MBCH has even a fraction of that utility on Moeing Chain, we should expect a great deal of BCH to be locked-up and used as MBCH, diminishing the available supply of BCH.

Moeing validators will need to stake MBCH as collateral. If any validator misbehaves while carrying out its duty, that collateral will be slashed as punishment. So that’s one other thing that will take BCH out of the available supply in the market.

Remember that it’s expected that a future hard fork of Moeing Chain will have BCH stakers voting for Moeing validators? At some point it will surely be possible for any average Bitcoin Cash user to be able to stake their BCH in pools to vote for profit-sharing Moeing Chain validators and earn gas fees. When these earning tools are available to anyone, that will be a huge Moeing-focused use of BCH that will diminish the available supply significantly. 

With Moeing Chain’s massive capacity and all the ways it will result in taking BCH out of the available supply and all the deflationary pressure on Bitcoin Cash, what do you think the result will be? How will Bitcoin Cash be affected? I think you know what happens to price when supply gets low. And it’s only a matter of time. Get ready for liftoff.

Moeing Chain Will Attract Additional Hashpower to Bitcoin Cash

We’ve all heard the complaints against Bitcoin Cash with people claiming that it’s “not secure”. Even though it is secure, it’s obvious that Bitcoin Cash is a minority chain with much less hashpower than BTC. And we all know it’s simply because hashpower follows price, not the other way around. 

Well, Moeing might change that, at least slightly. Remember that Bitcoin Cash miners will vote for Moeing validators. And remember that BCH miners will probably run their own Moeing validation nodes and vote for themselves. That’s because it will be an opportunity for them to earn more in fees. They can continue to earn their BCH mining fees as they have been doing. And they can secure an extra revenue stream on Moeing Chain with a very modest investment. 

As Moeing Chain matures and gains users and applications, we should expect the Moeing gas fees to become more and more attractive. As the gas fees become more attractive, we should expect more BCH miners to set up Moeing validation nodes so they can vote for themselves as Moeing validators. This could have the interesting effect of attracting more hashpower to Bitcoin Cash than the BCH price by itself warrants (compared to other SHA-256 coins). 

It’s impossible to know exactly how much additional hashpower Moeing Chain will attract to Bitcoin Cash, but it will be interesting to see what the long-term effects will be.

Moeing Chain is Led by People Who Know the Importance of On-Chain Scaling

Who is behind this Moeing Chain anyway? Who’s funding this? It’s important to know who is backing such an ambitious endeavor. 

Moeing is sponsored by Matrixport, which is a crypto financial services company founded by none other than Jihan Wu, a long-time supporter of large blocks and peer-to-peer cash. Wu co-founded Bitmain, the world’s most successful chipmaker for crypto mining hardware. In 2019 he founded Matrixport, which is aimed at professional cryptocurrency traders, miners, and mining pools. Additionally, Matrixport launched Bit.com, a crypto derivatives exchange. Bit.com started offering BCH options earlier this year.

But who exactly is the brains behind the development of Moeing Chain? The lead developer of Moeing Chain is Kui Wang. Wang has worked with Jihan Wu for years. Wang joined Bitmain in 2016 and then started working at Matrixport when it was launched in 2019. 

You’ve probably noticed by now that Moeing Chain requires coordination with Bitcoin Cash miners and that is rarely an easy thing. Thankfully Jihan Wu and Kui Wang have strong connections with the miners due to their work at Bitmain and Matrixport. I’ve been assured the coordination with miners concerning Moeing Chain is moving forward.

But why did Moeing ultimately choose Bitcoin Cash upon which to establish a sidechain for smart contract and DeFi applications? Surely there were several other cryptocurrencies to choose from that don’t carry the weight of all the drama and FUD that has been heaped upon Bitcoin Cash. So what’s the deal?

Moeing chose Bitcoin Cash as the base chain for their project because of the shared ethos of on-chain scaling and incredibly high throughput. The people behind Moeing Chain didn’t want to simply clone Ethereum as BSC (Binance) and Heco (Huobi) have done. Forking Ethereum as is would certainly be the easy route, but doing so would mean inheriting the false assumptions that blockchains can’t or shouldn’t scale and that it’s futile to strive to put every transaction on-chain.

The people behind Moeing understand the necessity of on-chain scaling. They want to make breakthroughs in blockchain capability! They know that it can be done while keeping the network decentralized and secure. Basically every other blockchain and cryptocurrency project out there believes the opposite. Moeing Chain didn’t want to settle for less than massive scaling and throughput. Thus, Bitcoin Cash was the obvious choice. The synergy that Bitcoin Cash and Moeing Chain can have together will create limitless potential!

Conclusion

You’ve probably heard that Vitalik Buterin was originally going to build Ethereum on top of BTC. But once he saw how development of that coin was crippled he wisely decided against his original plans and went his own way. 

Now I think it’s quite poetic that Moeing Chain - a wonderfully-optimized version of Ethereum - is going to be built on Bitcoin Cash. It’s like Vitalik’s original idea is finally coming home where it belongs.

As Moeing Chain gains adoption and users, Bitcoin Cash will become an essential coin in the DeFi space. The price is sure to be affected, interest in Bitcoin Cash will rise, and it is inevitable that multitudes of people will discover the amazing properties of the world's best peer-to-peer digital cash. Therefore, adoption of Bitcoin Cash, outside of Moeing Chain, is sure to rise.

Moeing is planning to launch by June of this year and it’s going to be a game-changer for Bitcoin Cash and the DeFi space. Moeing is sponsored by Matrixport but that doesn’t mean it already has all the resources it needs. The people behind Moeing will probably run a Bitcoin Cash Flipstarter soon and they will need your support in the coming days!

If you weren’t excited before, I hope you are now because good things are coming. Reserve your seats on the Bitcoin Cash/Moeing Chain rocket while you can and remember to buckle up!