As the week begins, five cryptocurrencies — among the top 100 in market cap — are leading the market’s attention with a positive performance on August 7, by press time.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the top performer, up 6.04% with a $457.46 million volume in the last 24 hours; followed by Dash (DASH) up 5% in price for the day but with only $64.57 million in volume — accounting for 14% of the leader’s exchange volume. Data is from CoinMarketCap, ranking BCH and DASH in the 16th and 90th positions by market capitalization, respectively.
Algorand (ALGO), Basic Attention Token (BAT), and Optimism (OP) are the following top gainers, with registered gains between 2-3%, in the last 24 hours. ALGO and BAT also have less than $40 million in the 24-hour volume, as opposed to more than $100 million in OP exchanged in the same period.
Picks for you
Bitcoin Cash and Dash, for peer-to-peer cash
Both Bitcoin Cash and Dash are cryptocurrency projects focused on delivering decentralized peer-to-peer cash, following the original vision of Bitcoin (BTC) by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Bitcoin Cash was the result of a chain split in 2017 in the Bitcoin Network, that originated two different crypto assets: BTC and BCH. The division occurred — among several reasons — over the decision to increase the maximum capacity of transaction blocks, limited to 4 megabytes in the protocol.
Bitcoin Cash supporters increased the block limit, under the premise of allowing greater scalability, transaction capacity per second, and lower network fees.
While opponents kept the block sizes as per the initial schedule, under the premise that the increase could harm the ability of node operators to be able to store all transaction history. However, In October 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto had already commented on the possibility of increasing the block size, in case the demand for the network also increased in the future.
Dash is also based on Bitcoin, but instead of a chain split, it resulted from a code fork — that changed a few parameters of the original protocol — creating a new project. Other known Bitcoin forks are Litecoin (LTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE).
The Dash team implemented a network fee for developers, to foment further contributions to the code. The block time was also reduced to 2.5 minutes, as opposed to BTC’s and BCH’s 10-minute block time — allowing the Dash Network to confirm transactions around four times faster than the Bitcoin Network.
Algorand, BAT, and Optimism
Algorand is a Layer 1 (L1) blockchain for decentralized applications (DApps) and Web3. A direct competitor to other L1 networks such as Ethereum (ETH), BNB CHain (BNB), Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL).
The Basic Attention Token is a utility token built as a smart contract on the Ethereum Network, created by the Brave Browser team. BAT is distributed to Brave users as a reward for being impacted by advertisements while navigating through the Chrome fork; and can also be used by these users to tip content creators in multiple platforms.
Optimism, the fifth top gainer in the last 24 hours, is one of Ethereum’s Layer 2s (L2). Created to help scale the main network with faster and cheaper transactions, competing with Polygon (MATIC), Arbitrum (ARB), Base (by Coinbase), and other L2s.
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