What happened
eCash (CRYPTO:XEC) was up 12.77% on high volume in the past 24 hours to $0.0002617 per token as of noon EDT on Tuesday. The coin is now the 31st largest cryptocurrency globally, with a market cap of $4.949 billion.
It was previously known as Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) and was created out of a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH 0.65%) last year, which is in itself a hard fork of the Bitcoin (BTC 4.70%) network. On Sept. 28, developers rebranded the coin into eCash with a redenomination of 1 million XEC per 1 BCHA.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
The technology behind Bitcoin is pretty outdated. Not only is it slow and costly, but its decentralized structure also means that at least 90% of Bitcoin miners around the world must come to a consensus for any updates to its protocol. Bitcoin transaction times can take up to 10 minutes and oscillate between $2 and $65 per transaction, depending on capacity. The network can only process 4.6 transactions per second. Meanwhile, the eCash network can handle 100 transactions per second with a settlement time of 3 seconds.
Now what
That's definitely a big step up from Bitcoin. What's more, eCash developers plan to scale up the network to handle more than 5 million transactions per second. But don't get too caught up in the euphoria. Right now, eCash adoption is still relatively low, and it's unclear as to how the scaling would work tech-wise. Nevertheless, it's a promising crypto to add to your watch list.
