Bitcoin Cash (BCH): D-Score 93/100 — Highly Decentralized BlockIndex D-Score: 93/100 (Highly Decentralized). Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a Layer 1 cryptocurrency using PoW consensus. Bitcoin Cash: Peer-to-peer electronic cash fork of Bitcoin with larger block sizes, low fees, and SHA-256 PoW security. Source: https://blockindex.ai/coin/bch · Data by BlockIndex.AI · Updated 2026-06-19 D-Score breakdown (0-100, higher means more decentralized) Component: Score: Overall D-Score: 93: Node distribution: 30: Initial distribution: 25: Governance: 21: Age and history: 12: Autonomy: 5: Key facts - Layer: Layer 1 - Consensus: PoW (SHA-256) - Launch: Fair Launch (2017) - Founder: Satoshi Nakamoto (original protocol); fork organizers and BCH developer community; notable advocate Roger Ver - VC funded: No - Max supply: 21,000,000 - Circulating: 20,049,778 (95.5%) Market data (as of 2026-06-19) - Price: $195.3 - Market cap: $3.92B - 24h volume: $180.16M - 24h change: -5.74% · 7d change: -4.18% About Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that emerged from a contentious hard fork of Bitcoin on August 1, 2017. The fork—executed at block 478,558—was driven by a faction of the Bitcoin community that prioritized on-chain scaling via larger block sizes to enable low-cost, higher-throughput payments. BCH preserves the core Bitcoin design choices such as the UTXO ledger model and SHA-256 Proof-of-Work security while diverging on protocol parameters, notably increasing the practical block-size limit from Bitcoin’s 1MB toward 8MB at fork and later references to 32MB capacity. The project positions itself as a payments-focused Layer-1 chain targeting merchant adoption, microtransactions and everyday payments by minimizing fees and preserving on-chain settlement without layer-two dependency. Technically, Bitcoin Cash is tightly coupled to Bitcoin’s codebase and architectural model but differs in design decisions around transaction capacity and certain script-level capabilities. The chain retains Bitcoin’s mining and halving schedule and uses SHA-256 as its mining algorithm. Development is decentralized across multiple independent client teams and implementations, which the BCH ecosystem argues increases resilience and uptime. At the same time, repeated hard forks and contentious governance episodes—most notably the 2018 split that produced Bitcoin SV (BSV) and later the 2020 ABC/BCHA divergence—illustrate how off-chain coordination and competing visions have shaped BCH’s evolution. The project supports token protocols and simplified smart-contract-like primitives layered onto its base protocol, enabling additional use cases beyond simple value transfer. BCH’s stated use cases center on merchant payments, peer-to-peer transfers and microtransactions, where low-cost on-chain settlement and resistance to chargebacks are selling points for adoption. The ecosystem includes multiple wallets (hardware and software), block explorers, analytics providers and exchange listings that enable broad fiat and crypto onramps. Merchant-facing integrations and promotional campaigns (discounts for BCH payments, merchant tools) are recurrent themes in ecosystem literature. The chain also supports privacy tooling and mixing utilities in the ecosystem, and third-party projects have experimented with tokenization and simple contract-like functionality on top of BCH. Tokenomics for BCH are inherited from Bitcoin’s supply model: a fixed maximum supply capped at 21,000,000 BCH and a deterministic halving emission schedule. The initial distribution method—creation by a blockchain split—meant BTC holders at the fork block received BCH balances rather than a traditional ICO or founder premine; therefore BCH is treated as having no premine or pre-issued public percentage. Governance remains primarily off-chain: protocol changes are coordinated through developer discussions, proposals and community signaling rather than an on-chain DAO. Future development work described in public materials focuses on sustaining low fees, enabling merchant adoption, and maintaining multiple independent client implementations to preserve decentralization and operational resilience. Links - Website: https://bitcoincash.org/ - Whitepaper: N/A - GitHub: https://github.com/bitcoincash --- About the D-Score: BlockIndex.AI rates decentralization from 0 to 100 across node distribution, initial distribution, governance, age and history, and autonomy. Methodology: https://blockindex.ai/dscore