Bitcoin Cash Network Stats Hint at Low TX Fees and High-Value Transactions

Now that the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem is finally off the ground, it will be interesting to see how things evolve over time. As it happens, there are some fascinating statistics already. Many coins have been transferred across the network over the past 24 hours, even though the number of blocks on the network is still fairly low. All of these statistics are rather remarkable.

Bitcoin Cash Statistics Are a Mixed bag

It is still too early to judge how Bitcoin Cash is shaping up, yet things are not looking all that bad right now. The network is only starting to get on its feet. The number of blocks discovered on the network is still incredibly low, but that is to be expected with so few miners supporting BCH right now. A total of 333 BCH blocks have been discovered on the network over the past 24 hours. That is nothing major, but it shows that the time between blocks is slowly coming down.

The mining difficulty itself keeps readjusting in order to accommodate the lack of hashpower.  The network has around 241 Petahash per second of mining power, which is not all that much. It is even a small decline compared to 24 hours ago, but that number will continue to fluctuate for some time to come. Few mining pools actually support BCH right now as most miners have stuck with BTC due to profitability.

It also appears that the people holding large numbers of BCH tokens are somewhat limited in scope. At present, around 5% of all tokens in circulation are held by the top 10 addresses, although for all we know, quite a few of these may still belong to various cryptocurrency exchanges. The vast majority of coins are controlled by addresses between the top 1,000 and top 10,000. There are nearly 60,000 unique BCH addresses in use right now. That number is surprisingly small, but these are still the early days.

One thing that many are certainly interested in is how large the Bitcoin Cash blockchain has become. Right now, the chain is nearly 150GB in size, making it a bit larger than the actual Bitcoin chain. Then again, with a project supporting blocks of 8MB, that size will continue to expand rapidly. None of the blocks are even remotely full right now, although there was a 4.9 MB block in existence just yesterday. 

The Bitcoin Cash network processed 23,420 transactions in the last 24 hours. That is a solid amount, although most of those transactions revolved around people moving funds to exchanges and converting BCH to BTC accordingly.  The total number of BCH tokens sent over the network over the past 24 hours is nearly 7% of its market capitalization. Over 1.148 million coins were sent to different addresses, a remarkable number. The average transaction value was 49.04 BCH, or around US$16,500.

Transaction fees are one of the main reasons why people support Bitcoin Cash right now, as the average transaction fee is $0.245. Considering that there is plenty of space within every network to accommodate transactions, that fee will not be going up anytime soon. In fact, it seems that the Bitcoin Cash mempool has cleared out with every network block so far. Whether or not that trend can be maintained remains to be determined. For now, things are slowly falling into place for Bitcoin Cash.