Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is currently trading at $574.84, experiencing a 9.06% increase in the last 24 hours as the second BCH halving event is set to occur next week. According to NiceHash data, it seems that investors are largely securing their positions in anticipation of the BCH halving event scheduled for April 4th.
Why Is Bitcoin Cash Surging?
On March 28th, the futures market saw $190,140 liquidated in short positions and $211,870 in long positions. On the same day, according to CoinGlass data, open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures contracts increased by 18.26% in 24 hours and by 165% over the last 7 days, reaching an all-time high of $708.75 million.
This level was last approached in May 2021, when OI reached $684.12 million, coinciding with the period when the BCH price hit its highest price in five years at $1,399. This contrasts with the same date in 2020, just before the first BCH halving event on April 8, 2020, when the open position in futures was $63.29 million.
The Bitcoin Cash Halving Event
In 2020, miner rewards were halved from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH. However, it seems that miners are taking this as a sign to increase their mining efforts ahead of the upcoming halving. A user named DavidShares on platform X told his 17,900 followers that the Bitcoin Cash hash rate doubled last week.
The hash rate is a measure of the total computational power used for mining and processing transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain network and is measured by the number of hashes produced. Meanwhile, as Bitcoin approaches its fourth halving event in the midst of record levels on April 21st, Bitcoin Cash continues to trade significantly below its all-time high of $4,355 reached in December 2017, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The BCH halving event is happening a bit earlier than the Bitcoin halving event due to Bitcoin Cash’s temporary use of a different algorithm in 2017 to adjust mining difficulty, thereby speeding up block creation time. The Bitcoin halving event is expected to take place on April 21st.
