Bitcoin Cash Activates Major Upgrade Enhancing Contract Efficiency

According to U.Today, Bitcoin Cash developer Jason Dreyzehner has announced the activation of a significant upgrade on the Bitcoin Cash mainnet, scheduled for May 2025. This upgrade, now live on chipnet at block 227,228, incorporates two Bitcoin Cash Improvement Proposals (CHIPs): the Targeted Virtual Machine Limits CHIP and the BigInt CHIP, aimed at enhancing the cryptocurrency's capabilities. The Targeted Virtual Machine Limits CHIP focuses on optimizing Bitcoin Cash's denial-of-service defenses by extending compute capabilities for real contracts by over 100 times, while simultaneously reducing worst-case node compute utilization by 50%. This adjustment lowers overhead, simplifies contracts, streamlines contract audits, and bolsters overall security. The upgrade is designed to improve contract efficiency, making advanced use cases more feasible, such as post-quantum cryptography, stronger escrow and settlement strategies, zero-knowledge proofs, and homomorphic encryption. Additionally, it introduces new tooling and a cross-implementation benchmarking technique to consistently verify node performance. The BigInt CHIP, or High-Precision Arithmetic for Bitcoin Cash, significantly reduces contract lengths by over tenfold, making previously theoretical applications immediately practical. This includes advanced automated market-making and exchange protocols, decentralized stablecoins, collateralized loan protocols, cross-chain and sidechain bridges, zero-knowledge proofs, post-quantum cryptography, and homomorphic encryption. The upgrade leverages Bitcoin Cash's scalable architecture to provide superior math capabilities, surpassing those of Ethereum, with "bare metal" performance, more byte-efficient, and cost-effective transactions. These enhancements are now accessible to Bitcoin Cash contracts on "layer one," ensuring censorship resistance and cross-contract compatibility without increasing compute requirements, allowing fully archiving Bitcoin Cash nodes to operate on low-cost consumer hardware. Overall, these upgrades aim to enhance Bitcoin Cash's functionality and competitiveness in the cryptocurrency market. Following the announcement, the price of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) showed a modest increase, rising 5% in the last 24 hours to $442, marking the second consecutive day of gains since November 15.