Originally published at https://mrnasdog.com/research/bch/inflation

BCH Inflation Analysis · August 2026 · Mixed flows, supply roughly steady

Bitcoin Cash has the simplest supply story the Pressure Framework tracks: mining is the only thing that makes a BCH, and nothing at all destroys one. Over the last 90 days the Bitcoin Cash chain minted 40,125 BCH across 12,840 counted blocks at a 3.125 BCH subsidy, against zero buyback, zero burn and zero new locked supply — a net +0.200% of circulating supply reaching the market, against +0.210% on the inflation monitor. With roughly 96% of the 21M hard cap already mined and the next halving not due until around Apr 2028, that figure is about as low as a chain that removes nothing can go.

The verdict, in one paragraph

The framework reads Bitcoin Cash at +0.200% net supply growth over the trailing 90 days and projects the same +0.200% for the next 90. The inflation monitor independently reads +0.210% over the same window, leaving a gap of 0.010 percentage points — far inside tolerance, so no data-conflict chip is raised on the BCH overview. That agreement is expected here, because there is only one supply mechanism to disagree about: the coinbase subsidy. Bitcoin Cash is a quiet, capped proof-of-work chain whose entire monetary policy is a fixed halving schedule inherited from Bitcoin and never amended in nine years.

Sell pressure: where new BCH comes from

There is exactly one source of new BCH, and it is Sell #1, protocol inflation. Miners earned 3.125 BCH per block for the whole window — the subsidy set by the height-840,000 halving in Apr 2024, read off real coinbase outputs at both ends of the window rather than taken from a stored parameter — and the Bitcoin Cash chain produced 12,840 blocks between height 953,519 on Jun 1 2026 and height 966,359 on Aug 30 2026. That works out to a realised interval of 605.6 seconds against the chain's ten-minute target, so the framework books the counted blocks rather than the scheduled ones: 40,125 BCH. Reading the target instead of the chain would have claimed 12,960 blocks and 40,500 BCH, about 375 BCH too much. That correction applies in full here because the Bitcoin Cash subsidy is paid per block and nothing in the protocol rescales it when blocks run slow — the difficulty algorithm retargets difficulty, never the reward.

The halving boundary was read from the chain rather than from any description of it. Block 839,999 paid a 6.25 BCH subsidy and block 840,000 paid 3.125 BCH, so the halving fires at the round block, not one block later. The next boundary sits at height 1,050,000, some 83,641 blocks past today's tip — outside the trailing window and outside the forward window alike, which is why one flat subsidy governs both columns of the BCH ledger.

Every other sell row is zero, and each is zero for a different reason. Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero because there is no vesting schedule anywhere in Bitcoin Cash: the chain launched in Aug 2017 by copying Bitcoin's ledger one-for-one, so there was no premine, no team allocation and no investor tranche to unlock. Sell #3, foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is zero because no foundation or protocol treasury holds BCH at all — the coinbase at both window edges carries a single spendable output paying the miner, and the 2020 proposal to divert part of that reward into developer funding was rejected and never activated on this chain. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero for the window: the Mt. Gox rehabilitation estate still owes creditors BCH alongside BTC, but the one estate movement inside this window was Bitcoin only, and the trustee publishes neither a Bitcoin Cash address nor a remaining quantum.

Buy pressure: where new BCH goes

Nowhere. All four buy rows read zero, and on Bitcoin Cash that is a design decision rather than an oversight. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is zero because there is nothing to buy back with — Bitcoin Cash keeps no protocol revenue and holds no treasury, so every satoshi of subsidy and fee leaves the protocol the moment a block is found. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is zero, and this build proved it on two separate surfaces rather than assuming it. The supply meter rose by exactly 40,125 BCH between the window ends and never fell, which rules out a supply-reducing burn; and the well-known unspendable addresses that a transfer-style burn would fill took no material inflow across the same window, which rules out the burn that a supply read cannot see. The coinbase itself settles the mechanism: the block reward equals the 3.125 BCH subsidy plus the block's entire fee total, to the satoshi. Fees on Bitcoin Cash change hands; they never leave supply.

There is one wrinkle worth stating plainly, because it is specific to a UTXO chain like Bitcoin Cash. Published Bitcoin Cash supply is cumulative issuance, so coins somebody sends to a keyless address are economically gone but still counted. That is a real gap in principle, and this build measured it rather than assuming it away — the quantum landing at those addresses inside the window is immaterial next to 40,125 BCH of issuance, so Buy #2 stays a documented zero rather than an assumed one.

Buy #3, foundation buy, is zero because there is no foundation balance sheet to do the buying; Bitcoin Cash upgrades move through an open proposal process supported by voluntary donations. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero because Bitcoin Cash is pure proof-of-work — there is no staking, no bonding and no protocol lockup, so holders have no built-in way to take coins off the tradable float. The practical consequence is that the framework's BCH reading can never be negative while the subsidy is still paying. The floor is the halving schedule, not a burn.

Foundation and overhang

Bitcoin Cash has almost nothing to enumerate here, which is itself the finding. There is no foundation treasury, no labs entity, no DAO treasury, no buyback accumulation wallet and no identified team multisig — a fair-launch fork inherits no cap table, and the coinbase reads confirm no new project-controlled balance can accrue either. The single tracked overhang is a bankruptcy-estate residual: the Mt. Gox rehabilitation estate, whose court-approved plan repays creditors in fiat, BTC and BCH. The plan designated roughly 143K BCH, with an undisclosed portion already paid out to about 19,500 creditors across the Jul 2024 and Mar 2025 rounds; the trustee has never published a Bitcoin Cash address or a current balance, so the framework treats the quantum as opaque and books no value. It is refreshed by walking the trustee's own disclosures.

A second holder now gets named often enough to be worth ruling out explicitly. A Nasdaq-listed company began a Bitcoin Cash treasury programme after a $500M private placement in Dec 2025 and has since said it is also building BCH mining capacity, but coins a listed company buys on the open market are not a Bitcoin Cash overhang: they were already inside circulating supply before the purchase, and the company answers to shareholders, not to the protocol. The Pressure Framework scopes Sell #3 to holders the project itself controls, so a third-party corporate treasury is watched as a demand story, never booked as a supply row. Its mined BCH, if the mining plan lands, arrives inside Sell #1 like any other block reward.

One nuance matters for reading the Mt. Gox overhang correctly: Bitcoin Cash has no non-circulating bucket, so those estate coins already sit inside circulating supply. A Mt. Gox payout therefore moves float from one holder to another rather than adding new BCH — it can pressure price without touching the inflation reading. The watch line still stands: if the estate's Bitcoin Cash 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 class of hard-capped proof-of-work coins whose issuance is a fixed halving curve and whose buy side is empty by construction. Against Bitcoin itself the mechanism is identical — same 21M cap, same 210,000-block halving interval, same coinbase-to-miner payout — and the two chains halve within months of each other because they share a subsidy schedule and a hashing algorithm. The difference is the fee market. Bitcoin Cash collects on the order of $80 a day in transaction fees against a market value near $5.1B, which is among the very lowest fee-to-value ratios of any chain the framework tracks — far below Bitcoin's, and orders of magnitude below a busy smart-contract chain's. Neither chain burns fees, so that thin fee market does not change the inflation reading; it simply means the Bitcoin Cash coinbase is almost entirely subsidy, and issuance is a near-pure function of block count.

The sharper contrast is with the chain that split away from Bitcoin Cash over exactly this question. eCash took the developer-funding path Bitcoin Cash rejected and now diverts a large share of every coinbase to protocol development, ecosystem funding and staking rewards; Bitcoin Cash pays 100% to the miner. Against uncapped continuous-emission chains — the proof-of-stake layer-1s that mint a percentage of supply every year and then hand it back as staking rewards — Bitcoin Cash's +0.200% per quarter is an order of magnitude quieter, and it steps down again rather than resetting. And against exchange tokens with quarterly buybacks, or fee-burning smart-contract chains, Bitcoin Cash simply has no deflationary lever at all: it cannot score at the top of the inflation metric, because a capped supply that removes nothing is still a growing supply.

What to watch in the next 90 days

The Mt. Gox repayment deadline of Oct 31 2026 falls inside the window and is the one dated supply-side event on the BCH calendar; a large estate distribution would not change the inflation reading but would move float, and any Bitcoin Cash movement books into Sell #4 at the next refresh. The lock-in date for the 2027 Bitcoin Cash upgrade is Nov 15 2026, also inside the window — the live proposals there are scripting and block-timing changes, and none of them touches the subsidy, the halving interval or the 21M cap, so a locked-in set would be a zero-supply-impact event. Watch the counted block pace, currently a 605.6-second interval: because Bitcoin Cash competes for the same hashrate as Bitcoin, a sustained shift toward or away from the chain moves Sell #1 by a few percent without any rule changing. Watch the Nasdaq-listed corporate treasury programme, including its stated plan to mine BCH — mined coins land in Sell #1 like any other block reward, while purchases stay a demand story. And watch the approach to the cap: with roughly 0.92M BCH left to mine, the halving at height 1,050,000 around Apr 2028 will cut the subsidy to 1.5625 BCH and roughly halve this reading again.

Summary

The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Bitcoin Cash at +0.200% net supply growth over the last 90 days and the same over the next 90, matching the inflation monitor's +0.210% to within 0.010 percentage points. The mechanism is one line long: 40,125 BCH of proof-of-work block subsidy, no buyback, no burn, no vesting, no treasury and no staking lock, against a hard 21M cap that is already about 96% mined. The key risk is not issuance but distribution — the opaque Mt. Gox estate residual against an Oct 31 2026 deadline, coins that already sit inside circulating supply and so would pressure price without registering as inflation. The ceiling is the schedule itself: Bitcoin Cash cannot shrink its supply, only slow its growth, and the next step down comes at the Apr 2028 halving.

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MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of BCH, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 31 2026.