BCH Smart? DApps, DeFi and smart contracts for BCH
According to the official document, the creators believe that Smart BCH “will provide the same benefits as ETH 2.0, but in a much shorter time”. Such optimism is commendable, but it is necessary to take a little look at the situation. Yes, BCH is a great cryptocurrency with a low transaction fee and a good market capitalization. This is a fairly useful coin that is traded on WallBTC and other popular crypto exchanges, but it seems that its main value is associated with its use as a digital form of electronic money. Or, in other words, a decentralized peer-to-peer payment mechanism.
BCH has an incredibly loyal community, which can be a good thing, but it also means that sometimes the community can think of BCH as a wonderful cryptography that can do anything and everything. For example, the SLP (Simple Ledger Protocol) on BCH allowed anyone to create their own cryptocurrency in a matter of seconds. This is great for innovation and allows people to get first-hand experience with cryptocurrency, but also contributed to the rapid spread of shitcoins, since anyone could create a coin with low barriers to entry. Similarly, BCH tried to get carried away with NFT, but creating an NFT on BCH was exponentially more difficult than on WAX.
The additional functions that BCH offers should be considered exactly as “additional”. These are functions that can be cool and interesting, as well as give the opportunity to learn and try different things, although it is not visible that the user went from WAX to BCH in a jamb because of the killer support of NFT. Similarly, there are no hordes of people leaving ETH / BSC en masse due to the potential of DeFi and smart contracts for BCH.
Of course, we may be wrong, but Smart BCH is an interesting concept that should be considered as an experiment and a test, nothing more.
Conclusion
Although many people really like BCH as a form of peer-to-peer digital cash, attempts to penetrate into other areas have left much to be desired. Its NFT support was quite buggy, and even a simple brief test of the Smart BCH features revealed a few bugs. It was not possible to get the faucet to work, and the DEX on Smart BCH had incredibly low liquidity. Most of the tokens on DEX are SLP tokens, which means that they have limited utility / exchange support outside of the BCH ecosystem.
At the same time, the community really likes BCH’s attempts to innovate, and, of course, it does not think that these attempts to offer new products and services are a bad idea. It would be great if Smart BCH worked, but even if it doesn’t, many people still like BCH for what it was designed for: a simple, easy-to-use digital payment mechanism with a low commission.