Polkadot Flips Bitcoin Cash Just Seven Months After Mainnet Launch

It’s been a meteoric year for Polkadot, the blockchain interoperability project that connects multiple blockchains into a single network. 

Having started the year as an outlier in the crypto world, its DOT token today increased to $8.02 at 9:45 am UTC. Its current market cap, $7.2 billion, has surpassed the market cap of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which dropped by 2.97% in the past 24 hours, putting it at a market cap of $6.3 billion. 

Having been in development since 2017, Polkadot’s utility in the crypto world amounts to something that helps iOS programs run on Windows. On August 21, Polkadot’s community of DOT holders voted in favor of the redenomination of DOT, inflating the circulating supply of DOT tokens by 100 times. 

DOT profited from this year’s Bitcoin bull run, which, since it’s beginning at the start of October, has seen the price of DOT grow by over 170%.

Bitcoin spinoff Bitcoin Cash (BCH), however, has been struggling ever since its launch in 2017. BCH was created to prime the antiquated Bitcoin for payments. It increased Bitcoin’s block size to 8MB (and later 32 MB), making it easier for the blockchain to process more transactions at once, at a fraction of the cost. 

BCH’s price has been on a downward spiral since its creation, though daddy Bitcoin is on the rise, as evidenced in this Christmas’s bull run. BCH’s recent history has been troubled after the network split over an unpopular mining tax of 8% that would have gone to one of the teams developing it. 

The uncertainty hurt the price of Bitcoin Cash. When the hard fork happened on November 15th, some cryptocurrency exchanges temporarily paused deposits and withdrawals as the future of the network hung in the balance. This pushed the price of Bitcoin Cash down by 5% in a 24 hour period reaching a low of $239.39. 

Since then, its price has grown past $350. But that isn’t enough to outpace DOT’s bull run.