Bitcoin SV (BSV)

Ticker	BSV
Category	Smart Contract Platform
Website	https://bitcoinsv.com/
Twitter	@BSVBlockchain

Bitcoin SV (abbreviated BSV, with "SV" standing for "Satoshi Vision") is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency operating on its own blockchain, created on November 15, 2018, through a contentious hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.¹² The project emerged from the "hash war," a dispute within the Bitcoin Cash community over the direction of the protocol, and was led by Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who has claimed, without providing conclusive evidence, to be Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, together with businessman Calvin Ayre.²³ Like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV uses the SHA-256 proof-of-work consensus mechanism and retains a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins.⁴ Its defining characteristic is a design philosophy centered on removing protocol-level limits, in particular the block size cap, in pursuit of what its proponents describe as restoring the original design and intentions of Bitcoin's whitepaper.⁵ As of September 2026, BSV ranked well outside the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, trading at a small fraction of both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.⁶

Overview

Bitcoin SV shares its transaction history with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash up to the respective points at which each network split off, meaning it inherits the same underlying monetary parameters as Bitcoin, including the SHA-256 mining algorithm, the 21-million-coin supply cap, and the halving schedule that periodically reduces the block reward paid to miners.⁴ Since its 2018 creation, BSV has diverged sharply from Bitcoin Cash both technically and in its stated goals. Where Bitcoin Cash increased Bitcoin's block size to 8 and then 32 megabytes, Bitcoin SV pursued a far more aggressive scaling philosophy, first raising and then ultimately removing the protocol-enforced block size limit entirely, on the argument that the network should scale on-chain without bound and that market forces, rather than a fixed cap, should determine practical block sizes.⁵⁷

Beyond payments, Bitcoin SV's advocates have positioned the network primarily as a platform for enterprise data applications, micropayments, and on-chain storage, emphasizing very low per-transaction fees and high transaction throughput rather than a "store of value" narrative of the kind associated with Bitcoin.⁵⁸ The project has been closely associated with a small set of organizations, most notably nChain, a blockchain research and development company at which Craig Wright served as chief scientist, and CoinGeek, a media outlet and mining operation backed by Calvin Ayre, which for much of the network's history directed substantial hash power toward it.³⁸

History

The 2018 hash war and the split from Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin SV originated in a dispute over a scheduled November 2018 protocol upgrade to Bitcoin Cash, itself a 2017 fork of Bitcoin.¹ At the time, the dominant Bitcoin Cash software client was Bitcoin ABC, led by developer Amaury Séchet and backed by prominent figures including early Bitcoin investor Roger Ver and Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu. Bitcoin ABC's proposed upgrade included a feature called Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR).¹ An opposing faction, calling itself Bitcoin SV ("Satoshi's Vision"), was led by Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre and opposed CTOR while favoring other changes, including a much larger block size increase to 128 megabytes.¹²

As the November 15, 2018 upgrade approached, both sides publicly pledged to direct mining hash power toward ensuring their preferred chain would prevail, a standoff that became known as the hash war.¹² Wright at one point suggested he might be willing to redirect resources, including selling personal cryptocurrency holdings, to fund the fight.² The conflict produced weeks of public acrimony and ultimately resulted in a permanent chain split: Bitcoin Cash continued under the Bitcoin ABC implementation and retained the BCH ticker, while Bitcoin SV emerged as a separate cryptocurrency and network with its own BSV ticker.¹²

Exchange delistings (2019)

In the months following the split, Bitcoin SV became the subject of a widely reported wave of exchange delistings tied to Craig Wright's legal conduct. In early 2019, Wright began sending legal letters threatening defamation actions against social media users and commentators who publicly disputed his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, including the pseudonymous Twitter user known as "Hodlonaut" and podcast host Peter McCormack.⁹¹⁰

The campaign prompted a backlash across the industry. On April 15, 2019, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance delisted BSV, with its then-chief executive Changpeng Zhao publicly calling Wright a "fraud."¹¹ The exchange Kraken announced the following day that it would follow suit, and several other trading platforms delisted the token in the same period, citing Wright's conduct.⁹¹¹ Supporters of BSV later characterized the delistings as coordinated censorship, and related litigation over the episode continued in subsequent years, while critics viewed the exchanges' actions as a response to Wright's use of defamation threats against his critics.⁹

The Quasar and Genesis upgrades (2019–2020)

Bitcoin SV pursued its scaling philosophy through a series of protocol upgrades that progressively raised, and then removed, the block size limit. In July 2019, the Quasar upgrade raised the default block size hard cap to 2 gigabytes.⁷ This was followed by the network's most significant technical milestone, the Genesis upgrade, which activated at block height 620,538 on February 4, 2020.⁵¹²

The Genesis upgrade removed the protocol-enforced block size limit as a hard-coded value, instead making it a configurable parameter that miners could set, and raised or removed numerous other limits, such as the maximum size of a transaction and constraints on the network's scripting language.⁵ BSV's developers framed the upgrade as "restoring" the original Bitcoin protocol as they interpreted Satoshi Nakamoto's design, hence the "Genesis" name.⁵ The upgrade also resulted in a minor chain split, as a small number of nodes that did not adopt the new rules diverged from the main BSV chain.¹²

Craig Wright's Satoshi claims and the COPA litigation (2021–2026)

Bitcoin SV's public identity has been inseparable from Craig Wright's assertion that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim he has pursued through extensive litigation. Wright brought or threatened numerous lawsuits against developers, companies, and individuals who disputed the claim or who he alleged had infringed intellectual property he associated with Bitcoin.¹³

In a libel action Wright brought against Peter McCormack, a London court ruled in August 2022 that although McCormack's statements had been defamatory, Wright was entitled only to nominal damages of £1, after the court found that Wright had advanced a deliberately false case and relied on evidence it did not accept.¹⁰ A more consequential case was brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), an industry group that sought a court declaration that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto. In March 2024, Justice James Mellor of the High Court of England and Wales ruled that Wright was not the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, was not the person who operated under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and was not the creator of the Bitcoin system, describing Wright's evidence as involving extensive "lies" and "forged documents."¹³¹⁴

Wright's subsequent attempts to appeal were unsuccessful; permission to appeal was refused, and in March 2025 the court noted that an application he submitted contained AI-generated citations to cases that did not exist.¹³¹⁵ Following contempt proceedings arising from breaches of court orders, Wright received a 12-month prison sentence suspended until December 2026, and the court imposed a general civil restraint order barring him for three years from bringing further claims related to his Satoshi assertions without prior permission.¹³¹⁵ The rulings were widely reported as a decisive legal rejection of the central claim underpinning much of Bitcoin SV's public promotion, although the BSV network and token continued to operate independently of Wright's personal legal situation.¹⁴

The Chronicle upgrade and Teranode (2024–2026)

Development of Bitcoin SV continued through the mid-2020s with a focus on high-throughput enterprise infrastructure, notably through Teranode, a re-engineered node implementation designed to scale the network to very high transaction volumes.¹⁶ BSV Association, the Switzerland-based organization overseeing the protocol's development during this period, reported that scaling tests of Teranode sustained transaction rates in excess of one million transactions per second, citing a test that averaged more than 1.1 million transactions per second over a three-day period.¹⁶

On April 7, 2026, the mandatory Chronicle protocol upgrade activated on the BSV mainnet. Its developers described it as completing the removal of what they characterized as artificial limitations remaining in the protocol, including certain constraints on transaction scripts and data handling.¹⁷ Reporting associated with the upgrade cited a sharp, temporary spike in on-chain activity around activation, including a large increase in the number of unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) and daily transaction counts, consistent with the network's emphasis on high-volume, data-heavy use cases.¹⁷

Technical characteristics

Block size and scaling philosophy

Bitcoin SV's central technical distinction is its rejection of a fixed protocol-level block size limit. Whereas Bitcoin has retained a 1-megabyte base block size, with Segregated Witness providing an effective capacity increase, and Bitcoin Cash raised its limit to 32 megabytes, Bitcoin SV removed the hard-coded cap altogether with the 2020 Genesis upgrade, making the effective maximum a matter of miner configuration and hardware capability rather than a protocol constant.⁵⁷ Proponents argue that unbounded on-chain scaling allows the network to serve as a global data ledger capable of very high transaction throughput at very low fees, while critics contend that ever-larger blocks raise the cost of running a full node and thereby concentrate the network among a small number of well-resourced operators, undermining decentralization.⁵⁸

Mining and monetary policy

Bitcoin SV uses the same SHA-256 proof-of-work algorithm as Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, which means miners can in principle redirect hash power among the three networks depending on relative profitability, and it shares Bitcoin's fixed supply cap of 21 million coins and the associated halving schedule.⁴ Because BSV commands a much smaller share of total SHA-256 mining than Bitcoin, its network hash rate and the economic cost of attacking it are correspondingly lower, a point critics have raised in relation to the network's security.⁸

Data and enterprise applications

Consistent with its high-throughput, low-fee positioning, Bitcoin SV has been promoted primarily as a platform for on-chain data storage, micropayments, and enterprise applications rather than chiefly as a currency or store of value.⁸¹⁶ The Teranode initiative, aimed at scaling the network to enterprise-grade transaction volumes, reflects this orientation, as does the network's emphasis on removing scripting and data-size limits through upgrades such as Genesis and Chronicle.¹⁶¹⁷

Market history

Bitcoin SV began trading immediately after the November 2018 split. It reached its all-time high of approximately $491 on April 16, 2021, during the broader cryptocurrency bull market of that year.¹⁸ The token subsequently declined substantially over the following years, in line with the broader market downturn but also amid the reputational damage associated with Craig Wright's unsuccessful litigation and the earlier exchange delistings, which reduced BSV's accessibility on major trading venues relative to comparably sized cryptocurrencies.⁶⁹

As of early September 2026, BSV traded at roughly $16, with a circulating market capitalization of approximately $330 million, ranking around 125th among cryptocurrencies by that measure, far below both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.⁶ This represented a decline of more than 95% from its 2021 peak, and BSV's market position remained a fraction of the roughly comparable networks from which it originated.⁶

Reception and controversies

Bitcoin SV has been among the more controversial projects in the cryptocurrency sector, in large part because of its association with Craig Wright's contested and ultimately court-rejected claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.¹³¹⁴ Critics have pointed to the March 2024 High Court ruling, which found that Wright had relied on forged documents and false evidence, as undermining the "Satoshi's Vision" branding at the heart of the project's identity.¹⁴ The earlier 2019 exchange delistings, prompted by Wright's defamation threats against critics, and the widely criticized use of what observers described as intimidation lawsuits, further shaped the network's contentious public reputation.⁹¹¹

Supporters, concentrated around nChain, CoinGeek, and the BSV Association, have continued to argue that the network's unbounded on-chain scaling model and its focus on data and enterprise applications represent a more faithful implementation of Bitcoin's original design than either Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, and have highlighted technical work such as Teranode's high transaction-throughput tests as evidence of the approach's viability.⁸¹⁶ Skeptics counter that the network's low hash rate relative to Bitcoin, its limited exchange support, its concentrated development and mining, and its sharp price decline since 2021 illustrate the practical limits of that strategy, and that its real-world adoption has remained modest despite years of development.⁶⁸

References