Bitcoin Cash open interest surpasses $700M before BCH halving

Bitcoin Cash hasn’t seen this amount of open interest since May 2021, when the price was roughly 2.5 times higher. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is presently trading at $574.84, up 9.06% in the past 24 hours, as the second-ever BCH halving event is slated to occur next week.

Traders appear to be significantly holding their positions in advance of the BCH halving on April 4, according to NiceHash statistics. On March 28, short holdings were liquidated for $190,140, and long ones for $211,870.

According to CoinGlass statistics, on the same day, open interest (OI) in Bitcoin Cash futures perpetual contracts reached an all-time high of $708.75 million, up 18.26% in 24 hours and 165% over the previous 7 days.

The last time OI approached this amount was in May 2021, when it reached $684.12 million, coinciding with BCH achieving its peak price in five years at $1,399. This contrasts with the same date in 2020, when futures open interest stood at $63.29, shortly before the first-ever BCH halving on April 8, 2020.

At the time, miner payouts were reduced from 12.5 BCH to 6.25 BCH. However, miners appear to be using this as a cue to ramp up their mining efforts ahead of the forthcoming halving. A user on X, “DavidShares,” informed his 17,900 followers that the Bitcoin Cash hash rate had doubled in the previous week.

The hash rate is a measure of the total computational power utilized to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, as indicated by the number of hashes generated. However, as Bitcoin approaches its fourth halving on April 21 amid record highs, Bitcoin Cash remains substantially lower than its all-time high of $4,355, set in December 2017. BCH halving occurred significantly earlier than Bitcoin halving because Bitcoin Cash momentarily used a different method to modify its mining difficulty in 2017, which accelerated block creation time.

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