Research shows: BCH and BSV still lag far behind Bitcoin

Coin Metrics recently conducted an on-chain data analysis and evaluation of Bitcoin, BCH, and BSV. After comparison, it was found that these two projects still have a long way to go before competing with any indicators of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Still Dominates
BCH just turned two years old on August 1st, born out of a hard fork in 2017 due to scalability issues, separating from Bitcoin to fulfill its original promise of peer-to-peer electronic cash. Supporters claim that BCH will become a fast and inexpensive medium of exchange.

In a report released on July 29th, crypto research institution Coin Metrics compared various on-chain metrics, including fee levels, transaction volume, active addresses, block size, and hash rates.

BCH and BSV have traditionally promoted themselves as payment mediums with low transaction fees. The report found that BSV and BCH had near-zero transaction fees for most of 2019, while Bitcoin's median fee has remained around 1 to 3 US dollars over the past three months.

However, the total daily transaction fees for BSV and BCH have stayed below $1,000 for most of 2019, while Bitcoin's daily fees often exceed $1 million.

More Transaction Volume, More Users

Bitcoin also leads in transaction volume and transaction value. The report found that the majority of BCH and BSV transactions do not transfer any value but are used as unrelated data in what is called OP_RETURN outputs.

As of July 1st, over 94% of daily BSV transactions did not transfer any value. By mid-July, over 94% of BSV transactions were sent by WeatherSV, a weather app that stores data on the BSV blockchain.

WeatherSV is a tech company based in Australia that launched the app in April this year to retrieve climate data stored on the BSV blockchain. The company stated that they chose BSV because the costs of running on Bitcoin or BCH chains were too high.

Over 67% of daily BCH transactions are built on OP_RETURN. Removing WeatherSV's transactions reveals that BSV has almost no on-chain transactions.

This indicates that BCH and BSV have not become payment mediums but are mostly used as data storage on their networks. Despite relatively higher fees, transaction volume is still dominated by Bitcoin.

According to a report, the difference in active addresses is significant. In 2019, BTC's daily unique addresses ranged from 600,000 to 1 million, while BCH and BSV were below 100,000 and 50,000, respectively.

Although BCH and BSV have larger block capacities, they have not utilized the additional space due to low activity levels. In most cases, the daily average block sizes for BCH and BSV remain far below Bitcoin's 1MB average.

These on-chain data are also reflected in the tokens' prices. Both BCH and BSV have seen significant declines over the past three months, with BSV facing a more pessimistic situation as its founder, Craig Wright, remains embroiled in a lawsuit over stolen bitcoins.

Related Reading

• Bitcoin Dominance Reaches New Highs Since 2017
• Research Indicates ICOs are Gradually Shifting Towards More Rational Fundraising Activities

Join now to get the most comprehensive information on Fintech, Blockchain, and industry examples!