What is smartBCH? Everything you need to know

One of the most interesting and fastest-growing smart contract platforms you should be following closely right now is smartBCH.

The chain has been making waves and gaining some real traction and you might be wondering, what’s this smartBCH thing people are beginning to whisper around?

That’s why I’m writing this article for you.

In this post, I’ll be sharing with you everything you need to know about this new and shining smart chain network.

What is smartBCH?

smartBCH (Smart Bitcoin Cash) is a smart contract platform built on the Bitcoin Cash network.

It is an Ethereum-compatible sidechain for BCH with high throughput, low fees, and a sub 6 seconds block time.

smartBCH is similar to the BNB Chain, Fantom, Heco, Avalanche, and all the other Ethereum-compatible smart contract platforms out there.

In fact, you can use the same Ethereum, BSC, Fantom, Polygon, etc. wallet on smartBCH.

All you have to do is, connect your MetaMask wallet to smartBCH, bridge some BCH to your wallet, and you’re instantly good to go.

Click here to read how to fund your smartBCH wallet using the hop.cash bridge.

Just as ETH and BNB are used to pay for gas fees on Ethereum and BNB Chain respectively, BCH is used to pay for gas fees on smartBCH.

Furthermore, just as tokens on Ethereum and BNB Chain are designated as ERC20 and BEP20 respectively, tokens created on smartBCH are referred to as SEP20 tokens.

Click here to read the full smartBCH documentation for more technical details.

What can I do on smartBCH?

Everything you can do on Ethereum and other smart contract platforms but faster and extremely cheaper.

Also, as a full-time degen, there’re lots of yield farming opportunities with high APRs and other DeFi stuff on smartBCH to ape into.

You can also create your own token project and start building on smartBCH like some of us.

The community would appreciate the value you bring and every contribution you make to the growth of the network.

The smartBCH team

Who are the people behind the smartBCH network?

smartBCH was launched on July 30th, 2021 and has a team of four (4) people working on it full-time.

They are:

Kui Wang: Kui is the lead developer of smartBCH. He studied computer architecture at Peking University and graduated with a PhD. Previously, he worked at Bitmain as a senior architect and was the inventor of several key patents.

Xiuhong Zhang: Zhang is a senior blockchain developer and an expert in virtual machines. Previously, he worked in various capacities in the gaming industry for ten years. He’s also an author of several books on JVM, LuaVM and WebAssembly.

Haoran Liu: Liu is a senior blockchain developer, Master of Tsinghua University. Previously, he worked at Huawei as an engineer for network products.

Theresa Huang: Theresa is a blockchain enthusiast and co-founder of Blockspaper and SnapFingers. She is good at blockchain community building, overseas marketing, strategic finance research, and fixed-income trading. Previously, she worked at Omise GoExchange, bit.fish, BGC Partners, and JP. Morgan.

In the same way as the Bitcoin Cash network itself, smartBCH is taking a community approach in its development of smartBCH.

That means that anybody can join and contribute to the development of the network in whatever capacity they can.

Advantages of smartBCH

• The smartBCH network fee is extremely low, ranging from $0.01 to $0.1. This is expected to go even lower with planned future upgrades.
• EVM-compatible. So developers can easily port their Ethereum-based dApps to smartBCH and run fluently at a low cost.
• smartBCH has a block time of 5 seconds. Putting it among the fastest smart chains.
• smartBCH is more decentralized than most Ethereum alternative chains, such as BSC and Heco which are considered to be mostly centralized.
• Competition is less severe and new project teams could easily gain traction with a good product.
• There’s an opportunity for developers to enjoy a first-mover advantage by building on smartBCH. There’s also the opportunity for investors to book a good position in great projects on smartBCH early before it goes mainstream. Early birds always win.
• The number of projects, dApps, and users, on smartBCH, is growing every day. So, in no time, it will be chilling with the big boys.
• 50% of the network fees on SmartBCH are burnt. Thus making BCH deflationary.
• Throughput will be up to 1 billion gas every 15 seconds, compared to Ethereum’s 12.5 million, making smartBCH an ultra-low latency network that allows dApps to perform faster.

Disadvantages of smartBCH

• The TVL (total value locked) on smartBCH is still very low. TVL on the network is currently at $67+ million, according to DeFillama.
• The number of active users, liquidity, and other metrics are also very low compared to other chains. As such, volatility could be very high for most tokens.
• smartBCH does not yet have the brand awareness and network effect of Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, and other popular smart chains.
• Only a few sectors of the DeFi economy on smartBCH are currently functional. Some services such as lending and borrowing, yield optimizers, etc are not available on the network yet.
• SmartBCH does not yet have all the capabilities and functionalities of EVM available on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Fantom, Polygon, etc. The tooling is still at a crude stage.
• Public perception of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is very bad due to the almost endless quarrels with BTC, and since smartBCH is built on BCH, it acquired some of that bad will automatically. So smartBCH gets snubbed just because of its association with BCH, and this is contributing to its slow user growth.

Why smartBCH?

You may be wondering since the BCH network is already fast, offers high throughput, extremely low fees, and instant transaction finality (0-conf) why do we need a sidechain?

The answer is simple…

SmartBCH was not developed to bring scalability to Bitcoin Cash, but to introduce smart contracts, tokenization, DeFi, capabilities to the network and new use cases for BCH.

Furthermore, with the heavy congestion and insane gas fees on Ethereum, SmartBCH offers developers a better environment to build and offer their dApp users low fees and fast transactions.

Thus it helps take some of the workloads off of Ethereum and offers users a better experience with DeFi at a considerably lower cost.

The most useful smartBCH tools

Below are some of the most useful tools and resources on smartBCH that you’ll find yourself needing and using very often:

1. Marketcap: is a crypto market data aggregator that shows you the current prices, charts, market capitalization, and liquidity of smartBCH (sep20) tokens, updated in real-time.
2. SmartBit: is a smartBCH block explorer with better transaction information, real-time on-chain stats, read/write to contract capability, contract verification capability, etc.
3. SmartScan: is the premier smartBCH explorer but is not as robust and useful as SmartBit.
4. TuxPaper: allows you to search the transaction history, token balances, number of holders, etc, of a smartBCH wallet or contract address. It was the main explorer for me until SmartBit.
5. Sonar: is another smartBCH block explorer that offers you more detailed on-chain stats, read/write to contract capability, contract verification, NFT domains (LNS) support, contract verification capability, etc. Sonar is even more thorough than SmartBit.
6. HelpMe: maintains a comprehensive list of smartBCH projects. If you want to fuck around and find out who’s building what on smartBCH, this is where to look.

Conclusion

smartBCH is a sidechain of the Bitcoin Cash network that enables developers to build and deploy EVM-compatible smart contracts and dApps.

The development of the smartBCH network, just like BCH is fully based on community effort with a laser focus on decentralizing every aspect of the chain.

Though the number of users, TVL, volume, etc. on smartBCH is very low at the moment, the chain has been gaining increased traction over the months.

More projects are being launched on the network and existing projects are launching new and better products almost every day.

True degens know it’s best to ape in early and ride the wave up.

What do you think about smartBCH? Is it worth exploring? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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