Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Unveils Major Upgrade, Targets Virtual Machine Limits and BigInt Arithmetic

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.

A major upgrade to the Bitcoin Cash mainnet has been activated at block 227,228 on the chipnet, incorporating two Bitcoin Cash Improvement Proposals (CHIPs).

The Targeted Virtual Machine Limits CHIP optimizes Bitcoin Cash's denial-of-service defenses by increasing compute capabilities for real contracts by over 100 times while reducing worst-case node compute utilization by 50%. This adjustment simplifies contracts, streamlines contract audits, and bolsters overall security. The upgrade improves contract efficiency, making advanced use cases more feasible, such as post-quantum cryptography, stronger escrow and settlement strategies, zero-knowledge proofs, and homomorphic encryption. It also introduces new tooling and a cross-implementation benchmarking technique to consistently verify node performance.

The BigInt CHIP, also known as 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.

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.