Bitcoin Cash completes second-ever halving

There has been speculation in the lead-up to the halving, with the price of Bitcoin Cash increasing 147.85% over the past three months, though it has dipped over the last 24 hours.

The second ever Bitcoin Cash (BCH) halving has just taken place as of 10:45 pm UTC on April 3 at block height 840,000 — where miner rewards have been chopped from 6.25 BCH to 3.125 BCH.

Bitcoin Cash is a proof-of-work blockchain network and cryptocurrency that was designed to be faster and cheaper to use than Bitcoin (BTC). The first Bitcoin Cash halving event took place on April 8, 2020, with miner rewards dropping from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH.

There has been speculation in the lead-up to the halving, with the price of Bitcoin Cash increasing 147.85% over the past three months and 24% over the past 30 days.

However, over the past 24 hours, it has dropped 9.94%. At the time of publication, it is currently trading at $572.21, as per CoinMarketCap data.

The recent price decline led to liquidations totaling $3.9 million, predominantly affecting long positions at $3.3 million, while short positions accounted for $569,540, as per CoinGlass data.

On March 29, Cointelegraph reported that open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts reached all-time highs of $708.75 million.

At the time of publication, the OI has continued its ascent, surging even further to $799.23 million.

Meanwhile, one X user “DavidShares” explained to his 17,500 followers that many miners had already switched over to mining Bitcoin ahead of the halving.

In 2017, Bitcoin Cash forked off from Bitcoin due to a group of the community disagreeing over ways of scaling up and decreasing transaction fees to adjust for the growing demand.

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Just two years later, it split again which led to controversy amongst the mining community as several had not upgraded to the new chain, resulting in a wasteful allocation of resources.

In November 2019, Cointelegraph reported that miners spent resources mining 14 empty blocks on the old chain that the majority of the Bitcoin Cash network already considered invalid and rejected.

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