Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Activates Critical May 2025 Upgrade Targeting Virtual Machine Limits and BigInt CHIP

Bitcoin Cash developer Jason Dreyzehner has shared that the critical May 2025 upgrade to Bitcoin Cash has now been activated on the mainnet.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developer Jason Dreyzehner has announced the activation of the critical May 2025 upgrade on the Bitcoin Cash mainnet.

In a tweet, Dreyzehner shared that the May 2025 upgrade to Bitcoin Cash is now active on chipnet at block 227,228.

This upgrade includes two Bitcoin Cash Improvement Proposals (CHIPs) which are Targeted Virtual Machine Limits CHIP and BigInt CHIP: High-Precision Arithmetic for Bitcoin Cash.

The May 2025 upgrade to Bitcoin Cash is now active on chipnet at block 227,228! 🎉 (0000000000b8dc4625844fa367b12317645fac7c9afbc5fb8def4025a6822c86)

This upgrade includes two Bitcoin Cash Improvement Proposals (CHIPs):

Targeted Virtual Machine Limits CHIP

The VM Limits CHIP retargets Bitcoin Cash's denial-of-service protection, dramatically increasing compute for real contracts by more than 100 times while reducing worst-case node compute utilization by 50%. By lowering overhead, retargeted limits simplify contracts, streamline contract audits and increase overall security.

This upgrade improves contract efficiency, making important use cases more practical, such as post-quantum cryptography, stronger escrow and settlement strategies, zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and other critical innovations for Bitcoin Cash's future security and competitiveness.

Finally, this release enhances the ecosystem by introducing new tooling and a cross-implementation benchmarking technique for continuously verifying node performance.

BigInt CHIP upgrade

The second upgrade, BigInt CHIP: High-Precision Arithmetic for Bitcoin Cash, offers over 10x reductions in contract lengths and makes previously theoretical use cases immediately practical. This includes more advanced automated market-making and exchange protocols, decentralized stablecoins, collateralized loan protocols, cross-chain and sidechain bridges, zero-knowledge proofs, post-quantum cryptography, homomorphic encryption and more.

This upgrade fully utilizes Bitcoin Cash's fundamentally more scalable architecture to provide math capabilities that surpass those of Ethereum such as "bare metal" performance, more byte-efficient and cheaper transactions.

These capabilities are now available to Bitcoin Cash contracts on "layer one," ensuring censorship resistance and cross-contract compatibility without increasing compute requirements, which implies that fully archiving Bitcoin Cash nodes can continue to operate on low-cost consumer hardware.

Overall, these enhancements aim to improve Bitcoin Cash capabilities. The price of the Bitcoin fork Bitcoin Cash (BCH) responded modestly to the news of the upgrade. At the time of writing, BCH has risen 5% in the last 24 hours to $442, marking the second straight day of gains since Nov. 15, assuming today closes in the green.