Bitcoin is up in value since the chain split to Bitcoin Cash, and transaction volume and fees have both dropped considerably as well.
Bitcoin Cash reached a pre-fork high of $424, before taking a dive to $216 as trading began on markets. The price then shot up to an all-time high of $756 before falling again to just about $200, now on a recovery to about $260. As a whole, the Bitcoin Cash fork is valued at about $4.3 billion.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has had an eventful week as well, falling to just under $2,700 during the fork, and since then has experienced a surge over the weekend, rising to an all-time high at present of $3,380. Since the fork, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash combined have added a total of around $15 billion in value.
Transactions and fees are down correspondingly
Correlated with the diversification into other cryptocurrencies and the new Bitcoin Cash fork, the transaction load, and fees, on the main Bitcoin chain have gone down significantly. Daily transactions dropped from a late-May high of 367,000 to a low of 131,000 at the end of July, with a present count of about 239,000. This current transaction load represents only 65% of peak congestion levels, while just a few days ago that share was only 35%.
This significant drop-off in transaction volume on the main Bitcoin chain has resulted in a corresponding drop in fees. Less than one month ago on July 15th, the average Bitcoin transaction fee was $3.55. Now that number sits at $1.43. The typical fees a user would expect to pay are slightly lower than that, seeing how the two most popular transaction fees were 4 cents and 96 cents, with most other transaction fees falling between those two numbers. While still high by “old Bitcoin” standards, these fees are nonetheless much more reasonable and less cause for alarm, and have freed up many previously unmovable balances to be moved.
Dash hopes to avoid similar scaling and governance drama
While the Bitcoin world has been waiting with baited breath for an end to the scaling drama, Dash has quietly remained focused on its own scaling plans, including increasing the block size to 400mb and beyond as necessary, incentivizing nodes to deal with the increased load such a large block size will require, and developing specialized hardware for nodes to facilitate this task. Most importantly, because of Dash’s decentralized governance system that allows the roughly 4,500 masternodes to vote for budget and governance questions (including potentially firing a development team that isn’t doing their job), internal strife has been practically nonexistent in the Dash community, and talk of a chain split is unheard of.
