Bitcoin Cash open interest surges past $700M ahead of BCH halving
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is currently trading at $574.84, having jumped 9.06% over the past 24 hours as the second-ever BCH halving event is set to take place next week.
Traders appear to be heavily securing their positions in anticipation of the BCH halving, which is scheduled for April 4, according to NiceHash data.
On March 28, $190,140 was liquidated in short positions and $211,870 in long positions.
On the same day, open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts reached all-time highs of $708.75 million, spiking 18.26% in 24 hours and 165% over the past 7 days, as per CoinGlass data.
The last instance nearing this level was in May 2021, with OI reaching $684.12 million, coinciding with BCH reaching its highest price in the past five years at $1,399.
This is in contrast to the same date in 2020, where futures open interest stood at $63.29, just before the first-ever BCH halving on April 8, 2020.
At the time, miner rewards halved from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH. However, miners seem to be taking this as a cue to increase their mining efforts ahead of the upcoming halving. A user on X, “DavidShares,” told his 17,900 followers that the Bitcoin Cash hash rate has doubled in the past week.
Hash rate is the measure of the total computational power used for mining and processing transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, measured by the number of hashes generated.
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However, while Bitcoin approaches its fourth halving on April 21 amid record highs, Bitcoin Cash remains significantly below its all-time high of $4,355, which it reached in December 2017, as per CoinMarketCap data.
BCH halving occurs slightly earlier than Bitcoin halving due to Bitcoin Cash temporarily using a different algorithm to adjust its mining difficulty back in 2017, therefore speeding up the block creation time.
The Bitcoin halving is scheduled for April 21.
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