Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/bch/inflation by MrNasdog.
Bitcoin Cash minted 39.8K BCH over the last 90 days — 12,737 blocks at a fixed proof-of-work subsidy of 3.125 BCH — and absorbed none of it, because Bitcoin Cash has no buyback, no fee burn and no treasury. The framework reads +0.20% net on a 20.07M circulating base against a 21M hard cap, about 96% mined. The supply monitor reads +0.32% — a 0.12-point agreement, comfortably inside tolerance.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window from May 5 2026 to Aug 3 2026, the framework reads Bitcoin Cash at +0.20% net inflation: mining emission of 39.8K BCH against exactly zero on the buy side. The supply monitor reads +0.32%, leaving a gap of 0.12 percentage points — comfortably inside tolerance, so no monitor-gap chip ships on the BCH page. Bitcoin Cash is a quiet chain with no discretionary supply: every BCH in existence came out of a coinbase output, the issuance curve has not changed since the 2017 fork, and nothing on the chain can vote a new coin into being.
Sell pressure: where new BCH comes from
There is exactly one source, and it is the block reward. Sell #1, protocol inflation, booked 39.8K BCH — and that figure is a count, not an estimate. Bitcoin Cash targets a ten-minute block, which would imply 144 blocks a day and 40,500 BCH over 90 days, but the chain does not run on target. Reading the chain end to end for this window gives 12,737 blocks between height 949,715 and height 962,452, or about 142 blocks per day — the network ran about 2% slow, because Bitcoin Cash shares its proof-of-work algorithm with Bitcoin and hashrate migrates between the two chains as relative profitability shifts. Its difficulty algorithm then chases that moving hashrate, so real block cadence drifts around the target in a way a nominal 144 never captures. At 3.125 BCH per block — the subsidy since the Apr 2024 halving — 12,737 blocks is 39,803 BCH. The subsidy was verified at 3.125 BCH at the window-open block, so no reward change happened inside it.
Every other sell row is zero, and each is zero for a structural reason. Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is 0 and always will be: Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin on Aug 1 2017 by inheriting the existing ledger one coin for one coin. There was no premine, no team allocation, no investor round, and therefore no vesting contract to unlock. Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 0 because Bitcoin Cash has no protocol-level foundation allocation and no diversion out of the coinbase. The one serious attempt to create one — the 2020 Infrastructure Funding Plan, which proposed routing part of every block reward to a development fund — was rejected by the ecosystem and never activated. Bitcoin Cash development has been donation-funded ever since, so there is no reserve pool that could be released. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is 0 for the window, but it is the one row worth watching rather than dismissing.
Buy pressure: where new BCH goes
Nowhere. All four buy rows are 0, and Bitcoin Cash is unusually clean about it. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is 0 because there is no protocol revenue and no treasury — the chain collects nothing and holds nothing, so there is no cash flow that could be pointed at the market. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is 0: transaction fees on Bitcoin Cash are paid straight to the miner inside the same coinbase output that carries the subsidy, so a fee is a transfer, never a destruction. The May 15 2026 Layla network upgrade, which activated four Cash Improvement Proposals — Loops, Functions, Bitwise and Pay-to-Script — landed inside this very window; it changed what Bitcoin Cash contracts can express and left the monetary rules untouched, adding no burn, no fund and no issuance change. Buy #3, Foundation buy, is 0 because no foundation entity holds a protocol allocation or runs an accumulation programme. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is 0 because Bitcoin Cash is pure proof-of-work: there is no staking contract, no bonding curve and no lockup to take coins off the float.
The result is that Bitcoin Cash prints its inflation at face value. On a chain with a buyback or a fee burn, the headline emission number overstates what actually reaches the market. Here it does not. The 39.8K BCH mined in the window is 39.8K BCH of new float, and the net is simply the gross. Newer ecosystem funding experiments seen this window — the Bitcoin Cashalyst bounty board and the CashTokens-based Milestara milestone-funding protocol — pay developers from donations and user capital, not from a coinbase diversion, so they add nothing to either side of the ledger.
Foundation and overhang
Bitcoin Cash has no team-controlled overhang in the usual sense. There is no foundation treasury, no labs multisig, no unscheduled allocation and no buyback accumulation wallet, because there was never an allocation to create one from. That leaves a single identified overhang, and it sits outside the protocol entirely: the Mt. Gox rehabilitation estate. When Bitcoin Cash forked in Aug 2017, the estate's Bitcoin holdings produced a matching BCH balance, and the Tokyo court's rehabilitation plan authorises repayment to creditors in fiat, BTC and BCH alike. Distributions have been running since 2024, and the trustee's deadline has been extended to Oct 31 2026 — just past the end of the next 90-day window.
The estate's remaining Bitcoin Cash balance is not separately disclosed. Public reporting tracks the estate in BTC terms, where roughly 34,689 BTC remained as of mid-2026, and the BCH side is quoted only as an original fork-era figure of about 143,000 BCH against which an undisclosed portion has already been distributed. That is a single, ambiguous source, so the framework treats the balance as opaque and the row as zero rather than inventing a quantum. No BCH-denominated movement was observed in this window. The overhang is monitored by walking the estate's public disclosures. If that balance falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #4 at the next refresh.
How BCH compares to other capped proof-of-work chains
Bitcoin Cash belongs to the small family of hard-capped proof-of-work chains whose entire supply schedule is a halving curve: Bitcoin itself, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. Within that family the mechanism is identical and only the position on the curve differs. Bitcoin Cash is about 96% mined with under 1M BCH left to issue, which is why its quarterly inflation prints at +0.20% rather than the multi-percent figures uncapped chains post. Litecoin, on a faster 2.5-minute block and a different halving calendar, runs roughly double that rate. The structural point is that all three are already close enough to their caps that new issuance is a rounding error against float — the supply question for a capped proof-of-work coin has largely been answered by arithmetic.
The sharper contrast is against chains that have a buy side at all. An uncapped smart-contract chain with a fee burn can run negative net supply in a busy quarter because the burn scales with usage; an exchange token with a quarterly buyback removes float on a schedule regardless of usage. Bitcoin Cash has neither lever, so its net can never go below zero. Its floor is its ceiling: the best reading Bitcoin Cash can ever produce is a small positive number shrinking toward zero as the halvings compound. That is a genuine structural difference, not a shortfall — a capped chain with no discretionary mechanism is maximally predictable, which is exactly what this metric rewards, but predictability is not the same as scarcity increasing.
The third comparison worth drawing is governance surface. A chain with a treasury, a DAO or a vesting cliff carries a standing risk that a vote changes the supply picture. Bitcoin Cash carries almost none of that. Its annual upgrade cycle is real and active — the May 2026 Layla upgrade shipped four scripting CHIPs — but nine years of upgrades have never touched issuance, and the one proposal that would have was rejected outright. For this metric, the absence of a lever is the finding.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the Mt. Gox trustee deadline of Oct 31 2026. It falls just past the next window, but any BCH-denominated estate movement before then would be the single largest supply event available to Bitcoin Cash and would populate Sell #4. Second, the observed block rate. This window ran at about 142 blocks a day against a 144 target; a sustained hashrate shift toward or away from Bitcoin Cash would move the emission figure by a couple of percent in either direction, which is the only real variable in the entire ledger. Third, the next Bitcoin Cash upgrade cycle, which by convention activates on May 15 each year — the CHIP process for the 2027 upgrade does its work in this period, and the item to check is whether any proposal touches issuance rather than scripting. Fourth, the halving at block height 1,050,000, roughly 87,548 blocks away and expected around Apr 2028; it is far outside the window but it is the event that eventually halves this page's headline number. Fifth, any first appearance of a corporate treasury or buyback programme denominated in BCH — none exists today, and a search of the last 90 days found none.
Summary
Bitcoin Cash is a fair-launch, hard-capped proof-of-work chain whose only supply mechanism is the block subsidy, and the framework reads it at +0.20% net over 90 days — 39.8K BCH mined across 12,737 observed blocks, with nothing absorbed on the buy side because no buyback, burn, treasury or staking lock exists. The supply monitor reads +0.32%, a 0.12-point gap that stays inside tolerance. The structural mechanism is the cleanest in the catalog: no premine, no vesting, no foundation allocation, no governance lever over issuance, and about 96% of the 21M cap already mined. The key risk is not protocol issuance but the undisclosed Bitcoin Cash balance still held by the Mt. Gox rehabilitation estate, whose repayment deadline is Oct 31 2026 — the only path by which a large block of BCH could reach the market without a single new coin being created.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of BCH, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 3 2026.
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