Bitcoin Cash made a significant technological leap on May 15, 2023, introducing four new features into its ruleset. This upgrade is a milestone for peer-to-peer electronic cash, as it aims to revolutionize blockchain’s ecosystem. The changes are more developer-focused, so ordinary users don’t need to do anything except miners and full node operators who should upgrade their software to be compatible with the new ruleset.
Cashtokens
The highly anticipated feature is Cashtokens, a transformative addition eagerly awaited by the BCH community. It intends to bring a wealth of new options for users. Among the benefits of Cashtokens, it includes the power to issue tokens representing a range of assets including low-fee, censorship-resistant digital assets acting as currencies and securities, with smart contract functionality. The innovation provides over a thousand times efficiency in transactions and block validation compared to Ethereum’s smart contracts.
Upgrade Features
The four new changes made by the Bitcoin Cash Network include:
- Cashtokens
- Allow Transactions to be smaller in size
- P2SH32
- Restric Transaction Versions
The Allow Transactions modification help prevents attacks where SPV wallets can confuse a 64-byte transaction for a merkle node, enhancing the security parameters. The P2SH32 alteration serves as a long-term remedy against 80-bit P2SH collision attacks, with enhanced cryptographic security measures. Furthermore, the “Restrict Transaction Versions”modification guarantees that only version numbers of either 1 or 2 are valid.
Impact of Cashtokens
Software developer Jason Dreyzehner shared with Bitcoin.com News his thoughts about Cashtokens on May 2, 2023. He considers that this new feature will offer a game-changing impact to Bitcoin Cash, empowering users to issue tokens. Cashtokens can represent a wide range of items with the added benefit of censorship-resistance digital assets. Furthermore, Dreyzehner explained that Cashtokens can act as currencies, stablecoins, securities, and more, opening up multiple possibilities for dApps while paving the way for low-fee, censorship-resistant prediction markets.
The network upgrade resulted in BCH opening higher on Monday morning, up by 4% against the US dollar, signaling potential for continued growth. Only time will tell if these new features will bring an influx of new users and push BCH further forward in the crypto space.
