SegWit was a contentious update as it enabled second-layer solutions on bitcoin, such as the Lightning Network.

[14] A group of bitcoin activists,[15] developers,[13] and China-based miners opposed the proposed SegWit upgrades designed to increase bitcoin's capacity; these stakeholders pushed forward alternative plans which would increase the block size limit to eight megabytes through a hard fork.

[14] In June 2017, hardware manufacturer Bitmain described a proposed hard fork with an increased block size as a "contingency plan" in case the bitcoin community chose to implement SegWit.

In July 2017, the mining pool ViaBTC suggested the name Bitcoin Cash for the fork.

Additionally, Roger Ver and other expressed that adopting BIP 91 (which was intended to activate SegWit) appeared to benefit those who viewed bitcoin primarily as a digital investment rather than as means of everyday transactions.

[45] Gary Gensler, the current chairperson of the SEC, stated in 2018 that Bitcoin Cash does not "appear to trigger the Howey Test.

[12] In November 2020, there was a second contested hard fork where the leading node implementation, BitcoinABC, created BCHA (now dubbed "eCash" or "XEC").

[50][51][52] On 26 March 2018, OKEx removed all Bitcoin Cash trading pairs except for BCH/BTC, BCH/ETH and BCH/USDT due to "inadequate liquidity".

[58] In 2022, PayPal enabled the sending Bitcoin Cash off app to users' own wallets/outside services.

Separately, Grayscale's Digital Large Cap (GDLC) fund includes Bitcoin Cash in its composition.

On 1 April 2024, Coinbase Derivatives announced plans to introduce futures trading for Bitcoin Cash.

[68] On 10 September 2024, eToro settled with the SEC agreeing to pay fines for operating as an unregistered trading platform.

[69] To keep the block generation time equal to ten minutes on average, Bitcoin Cash uses an algorithm adjusting the mining difficulty parameter.

Since 1 August 2017, Bitcoin Cash also used an addition to the DAA, called an Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) algorithm.

EDA was used alongside the original DAA and it was designed to decrease the mining difficulty of Bitcoin Cash by 20%, if the time difference between 6 successive blocks was greater than 12 hours.

To address the problem with stability, a change of the Bitcoin Cash DAA was implemented and the EDA canceled.