Bitcoin SV (BSV) is a cryptocurrency created by a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in November 2018. Bitcoin Cash had itself split from Bitcoin (BTC) a year earlier, in 2017.
SV stands for 'Satoshi Vision'. The project aims to follow the original design set out in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper and the early Bitcoin client. At launch, development was led by nChain and Craig Wright, among others.
BSV removed the artificial block size cap and re-enabled Script opcodes that had been disabled on BTC. The goal is to support micropayments with very low fees and large amounts of on-chain data.
In April 2026, the Chronicle upgrade activated at block height 943,816. Development has since focused on Teranode, new node software built to raise throughput. Note that the published Teranode performance figures come from test environments.
Data provided by CoinGecko
BSV uses SHA-256 proof-of-work, the same as Bitcoin, and has the same maximum supply of 21 million coins. Mining rewards are cut in half roughly every four years.
The ecosystem focuses on tokens, smart contracts, data recording and enterprise applications. The BSV Association oversees technical standards (BRCs) and developer tooling, and standards for payments by AI agents have recently been discussed.
BSV's main stated strengths are high throughput, low fees and close adherence to Bitcoin's original design. These could suit services that record large amounts of data or rely on micropayments.
On the other hand, the 2019 delistings by several major exchanges, 51% attacks in 2021 and a 2024 UK court ruling that Craig Wright is not Satoshi have all raised questions about trust. BSV's relatively small hashrate and liquidity are also worth weighing.
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