One Year Later, A Wave of Apps Is Emerging on Bitcoin Cash

Since many of bitcoin's most active developers were adamantly against the tweaks bitcoin cash stood for, the developers behind the alternative protocol see these apps as proof their offering is competitive.

"The tremendous accomplishments that the bitcoin cash community has managed to garner in a year of existence with a new ticker, wallets and an all-around ecosystem has been phenomenal, and we hope to continue and increase on this trajectory," Eli Afram, founder of Bitcoin Cash Australia, an advocacy group for the software, told CoinDesk.

For many app developers, the lure to bitcoin cash is all about the protocol's unique selling proposition - basically, more space.

Since bitcoin cash allows for more data to be stored in each transaction, supporters argue bitcoin isn't capable of supporting an app like Memo.cash.

"Many of these apps cannot work on the bitcoin network, simply because of certain limiting changes that have been made to the codebase. For example, the OP RETURN function on bitcoin cannot take the same size payload as bitcoin cash, meaning an app like Memo would have a restrictive message size limit," Afram explained.

Many of these developers compare the fees on bitcoin cash to those of bitcoin during the latter's most popular time period, whereby fees eclipsed $20 per transaction.

Bitcoin fees are rather low - sometimes even lower than those on bitcoin cash today.

That hasn't necessarily happened in practice so far - not for bitcoin cash, which only sees a fraction of the transactions the main bitcoin network sees and is worth about a tenth of bitcoin by market cap, but also not for bitcoin either.

Not only are developers thinking about high-value payments use cases, but the use case that garnered incredible attention last year - the initial coin offering - is also being considered for bitcoin cash as well.

Crypto tokens could be the next step towards differentiating bitcoin cash from its rival, bitcoin, and adding features that allow it to compete with even more protocols.