Bitcoin is the father of all cryptocurrencies and it leads the whole blockchain world as nothing else - while probably no cryptocurrency enthusiast would deny that, it is also not a secret that Bitcoin lacks a proper scaling solution. Throughout the past couple months, the whole space was debating about an implementation of the Segregated Witness protocol and the Lightning Network. While Bitcoin’s developers spend months for discussing the upgrade, a hybrid fork of Bitcoin simply took the step and implemented both: Bitcore.

What is Bitcore?

Originally founded in April 2017, Bitcore made history as one of the first cryptocurrencies to conduct a hybrid fork of the Bitcoin blockchain at block 463619. In detail, the project took a snapshot of Bitcoin’s blockchain and distributed BTX tokens to actual Bitcoin owners completely free of charge. Unlike hard forks, such as Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold, the Bitcore blockchain features a completely novel blockchain history instead of copying Bitcoin’s blockchain. All users who owned at least 0.1 Bitcoin on November 2 in 2017 are still able to claim their BTX on the project’s website.

What are the benefits?

The main issue of Bitcoin is without a doubt its (hardly existing) scalability. Transactions often take at least 30 minutes and come with unreasonable high fees for using the network. This is where the Bitcore team steps in with their original community-driven, peer-to-peer digital payment solution that features considerable scalability. Thanks to the implementation of Segwit and the lightning network, Bitcore’s blockchain is able to process an unlimited amount of offline transactions per second, enabling almost instant transactions and fees that are as low as $0.003 per transaction. Of course, fast and cheap transactions are essentially key for becoming an everyday currency used by a wide range of user. Furthermore, due to the fact that running a Bitcore node requires only a tiny amount of storage, participation in the blockchain is open to a way bigger amount of users. Last but not least, Bitcore‘s ASIC-resistant mining algorithm restores community participation and counters centralization effects in mining.

What else is there?

In January 2018, Jimmy Song, one of the most popular Bitcoin core developers, mentioned Bitcore in an article as the most clever Bitcoin hard fork. He especially thinks that the exclusion of Bitcoin’s gigantic blockchain history of more than 120 Gigabyte could be a great benefit of the project. In addition, members of the team previously worked with several cryptocurrency projects, gaining a lot of experience in terms of programming a blockchain architecture. These projects include well-known players like B3 Coin, BitSend and BitCloud.

Regarding the charts of BTX: The coin previously reached a market capitalization of more than $400 million, indicating a strong presence of supporters. Due to the ongoing market downturn in 2018, the project is currently valued around $14 million, which could be considered as a good moment for getting involved. In the future, Bitcore aims to develop new and important features like a fiat gateway, Wordpress plugins and hardware wallet integrations. If you didn’t held Bitcoin on November 2, this might be a good chance to get some BTX on exchanges like HitBTC or Cryptopia.

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. This article has been sponsored by cryptoprofile.com