Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a hard fork of Bitcoin, created on August 1, 2017 to increase the block size to 8MB. This allows faster transactions and lower fees, making it more suitable for payments than Bitcoin.
On November 16, 2018, BCH underwent another hard fork, splitting into Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC. Bitcoin ABC became the main chain and retained the BCH token.
The fork was driven by disagreements in the Bitcoin community about block size. Bitcoin’s 1MB blocks limited it to 2-7 transactions per second, much slower than payment networks like Visa, which handles 1,700 TPS. Bitcoin Cash aimed to improve scalability and enable wider adoption for payments.
Reference: CoinMarketCap