NEW YORK, April 23, 2026, 04:46 EDT
Bitcoin Cash edged lower early Thursday, giving back part of the previous day’s move as attention turned to U.S. derivatives tied to the token. Spot BCH traded at $455.82, and Coinbase’s BCH perpetual-style contract sat at $456.40 after rising as high as $473.60 in the past 24 hours.
The move matters because U.S. exchanges are positioning for wider perpetual futures trading, or leveraged contracts with no expiry, a market that can sharpen swings in smaller coins if liquidity builds. Yet Coinbase’s BCH contract still showed only about $1.25K in open interest, the value of outstanding positions, and $1.98K in 24-hour volume on Thursday, underscoring how thin U.S. appetite for leveraged BCH remains.
Bitcoin Cash, a fork of bitcoin built to add transaction capacity for everyday payments, carried a market value of about $9.23 billion on Thursday. That left it far behind bitcoin at $77,753 and ether at $2,336, but still large enough to show up on a major U.S. derivatives venue.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that exchanges are racing to capitalize on expected U.S. clarity around perpetual futures, often called perps. Kraken’s parent is buying Bitnomial for up to $550 million to access the market, Robinhood is exploring U.S. offerings and Gemini has said it is examining the space.
CFTC Chair Michael Selig said last month the agency plans to act in the “near future,” and Rebecca Rettig, chief legal and operating officer at Jito Labs, said regulators have been “extremely engaged” with the industry on how the products fit existing rules. That matters for BCH because Coinbase already lists a cash-settled, five-year Bitcoin Cash perpetual-style contract on its U.S. derivatives exchange. Reuters
Boris Ilyevsky, Coinbase’s head of U.S. futures, told Reuters he expects the retail market for perps to keep growing and said the exchange already handles millions of perp trades a day worth billions of dollars in underlying trade value. Bitwise research head Ryan Rasmussen said more investors will take risks in perpetuals than they might in traditional futures.
But the downside is easy to see. Better Markets’ Ben Schiffrin warned losses can “compound and compound” when leverage turns against traders, and BCH was already down about 3.6% on Thursday, with only light visible positioning in the Coinbase contract. Reuters
BCH also has its own near-term catalyst. The Bitcoin Cash Node team says version 29.0.0 implements the network’s May 15, 2026 upgrade, and users running version 28.x or older are urged to update before then to remain compatible after activation.
The change adds new scripting features — the low-level rules that govern what transactions can do — including Pay to Script, bounded looping, function calls and bitwise operations. In practice, that broadens the range of transaction logic developers can express directly on the network.
Even so, Thursday’s pullback left BCH well below the $667.95 high shown in Coinbase’s one-year range. Unless U.S. derivatives volumes build and the May upgrade lands smoothly, Bitcoin Cash may keep trading in bursts rather than on a steadier bid.
