No one could have anticipated that this round of market trend driven by mainstream financial institutions' application for Bitcoin spot ETF would ultimately benefit the Bitcoin fork project - BCH (Bitcoin Cash).

Coingecko data shows that in the past week, BCH has led other cryptocurrencies with a rise of 106.5%; in the past two weeks, BCH has soared from $101 to $325, with a highest increase of 221%, currently reported at $294.

Interestingly, as BCH rises, several other forked coin projects have also seen decent gains: BCH fork project eCash (formerly known as BCHA) has a weekly increase of 58.2%, ranking second; another BCH fork project Bitcoin SV (BSV) led by CSW (also known as "Fake Satoshi") ranks fourth with a weekly increase of 35.2%. Since these tokens all use the POW mechanism, the community is rallying: Make Pow Great Again, leading to a general increase of over 10% today for a batch of old-school POW public chain tokens such as Litecoin (LTC), Dash, and Ethereum Classic (ETC).

In addition to the token's increase, there is a circulating and heated discussion in the BCH community: the former king of BCH, Wu Jihan, is about to return for construction, and the community is shouting that the next resistance level for BCH is $1000 (the historical high is $1650). Although there is no official news to verify the rumors, the name Wu Jihan carries weight in the BCH community—just like Vitalik Buterin in Ethereum.

For newcomers to cryptocurrency investing after the DeFi boom, Wu Jihan, who has been silent for the past two years, may seem like a stranger, but he was definitely a top player before 2021. As one of the founders of Bitmain, the world's largest mining machine manufacturer, and a "mining overlord" in the media, Wu Jihan is a "godfather" figure in the cryptocurrency industry, and every word and action has a significant impact on the entire market, just like CZ, the founder of Binance, today.

BCH once became the hottest fork coin in the market in 2017 with Wu Jihan's support. However, with two hard forks and Wu Jihan getting entangled in the internal struggles of Bitmain, unable to chase after the DeFi wave that ignited the next bull market, BCH slowly faded out of the mainstream circle.

However, the BCH's past drama is no less exciting than today's various industry stories and accidents.

(1) Wu Jihan Forks Bitcoin, BCH is Born

In 2017, the Bitcoin community experienced intense conflicts: on one side, represented by Bitcoin ABC, was the large block solution, advocating for an increase in the block size limit (from 1 MB to 8 MB) to improve Bitcoin's transaction speed. On the other side, represented by Bitcoin Core, were the purists who advocated solving scalability issues through advanced technology (such as Lightning Network) without changing the Bitcoin network's code.

Finally, with the support of Bitmain's considerable computing power, the first hard fork in Bitcoin's history occurred, giving birth to Bitcoin Cash (BCH). At its peak, BCH's market value was once among the top four—In December 2017, the BCH/BTC exchange rate reached a historical high of 0.284 (now 0.01), but it has never reached that level again.

After BCH, there have been hundreds of Bitcoin fork projects in the market, but they have all quickly died out and failed to achieve the achievements of BCH. Wu Jihan, who was the first to lead the fork of Bitcoin, has also been labeled with various insults, but that doesn't diminish his satisfaction with the "work" he created.

>"Bitcoin Cash has become an important player in the cryptocurrency market, not only because of its unique characteristics and advantages, but also because it complements and coexists with other digital currencies. The fork event of Bitcoin Cash, although controversial and turbulent, has also brought more opportunities and challenges to the entire cryptocurrency market." > > "Although in an interview in February 2018, Wu Jihan criticized some of the design and implementation plans of BCH, and believed that the project could not achieve its original goals, he did not give up on BCH, as can be seen from the subsequent fork war." > >

(2) BCH Fork, Wu Jihan's Battle with CSW

> > "A year after the birth of BCH, an Australian named CSW (Craig Wright, also known as Fake Satoshi) began forking BCH, and Wu Jihan also experienced the pain caused by the fork." > > "In November 2018, BCH underwent an upgrade, introducing a new feature called Canonical Transaction Ordering (CTOR). However, this upgrade did not receive consensus from all members. Radicalist CSW proposed directly adopting a 128M large block and "locking" the client to version 0.1 from the Satoshi era, which was opposed by Wu Jihan and the Bitcoin ABC team. Wu and CSW quickly started a long-lasting quarrel, throwing dirty words at each other." > > "Eventually, two incompatible versions were born - BCHABC (supported by Wu Jihan, Roger Ver, etc.) and BCHSV (supported by CSW, etc.). At the beginning of the fork, both sides claimed to be the legitimate BCH and sought community support and market recognition. Subsequently, the competition between the two sides became more intense, including mining power struggles, community voting, and various propaganda offensives and defenses. In the end, Wu Jihan's side emerged victorious, BCH ABC was renamed BCH again, and BCHSV was replaced by BSV." > > "Although Wu Jihan won, BCH experienced a drastic price drop after the fork - in just one month, the price of BCH plummeted from $552 before the fork to $74, a 83% decline. Even considering the emergence of BSV after the fork, investors still suffered heavy losses." > >

(3) ABC Team Betrayal of Wu Jihan, BCH Again Fork

"Congratulations! After this new block, there will be no more troublemakers in the BCH community!" On November 16, 2018, Wu Jihan tweeted after defeating CSW. But at that time, he did not expect that BCH would experience another fork two years later.

The core of the fork is an upgrade called the "Infrastructure Funding Plan" (IFP), which will obligate 8% of the block reward (in Bitcoin Cash earned by miners) to be allocated to software projects that support BCH, such as Bitcoin ABC.

The IFP requires all BCH miners to give up more profit to donate to developers, something that miners do not want to see. As a result, early BCH developer Freetrader chose to fork and gained the favor of many miners, communities, and users. In the end, BCH hard forked again into two chains: BCHN (Bitcoin Cash Node, without IFP restrictions) and BCHA (Bitcoin Cash ABC, with IFP restrictions).

With the fork, a new round of "BCH" naming rights dispute began again. It was initially thought that the ABC team, which dominated BCH's development for three years, would win. However, the final result was that BCHN, which had the advantage in public opinion and support, won the BCH naming rights, while BCHA also announced in August 2021 that it had been renamed eCash (XEC).

The question is, why didn't Wu Jihan, the leader of the ABC team, speak out when ABC's betrayal caused a split in the community? The answer is that Wu Jihan was deeply involved in the power struggle within Bitmain at the time and had no intention of managing BCH.

(4) Bitmain Power Struggle

Starting in 2019, the conflicts between Wu Jihan and another co-founder of Bitmain, Micree Zhan, became public.

In October of that year, Wu Jihan issued an internal memo to employees, removing Micree Zhan from all positions at Bitmain. In November, Wu Jihan held a "special shareholders' meeting" in Beijing, completely depriving Micree Zhan of absolute control over the company.

Being ousted from the company, Micree Zhan had no choice but to file lawsuits. He also wrote an open letter, saying that he was betrayed by his once most trusted partner.Partners, brothers fighting together, stabbing knives behind their backs. Subsequently, Zhan Ketuan sued in multiple places and obtained support from the Haidian District People's Government in January 2020, requesting that the legal representative of Bitmain be changed to Zhan Ketuan. On May 8th of that year, a dramatic scene unfolded. Zhan Ketuan went to the Haidian District Government Service Center to collect the business license and was snatched by a group of unidentified men. The public opinion was in an uproar. Thereafter, the two parties entered into negotiations, which lasted for several months and finally reached an agreement in January 2021. Zhan Ketuan purchased nearly half of Bitmain's shares held by Wu Jihan and a group of founding shareholders for $600 million, and Wu Jihan officially resigned from Bitmain; Bitmain would divest its mining pool and cloud mining business, namely BitDeer, together with the mining farms in the United States and Norway, and Wu Jihan would serve as the chairman of BitDeer. In the following two years, Wu Jihan's public statements decreased, and BCH was no longer valued by Bitmain after several splits and Wu Jihan's departure. Meanwhile, as Ethereum shifted to PoS along its established roadmap, the industry's mainstream narratives and trends also changed, with several new PoS public chains emerging and DeFi igniting a new bull market. The mining industry, which once held the lifeline of the industry, gradually left the center stage under heavy regulation. BCH developers also attempted to embrace DeFi at one point, but it did not generate significant waves. However, for BCH at present, it seems to be a turning point in which the future becomes promising. First, the attractiveness of Bitcoin spot ETF is increasing, with expectations of igniting a bull market. Second, the Bitcoin ecosystem has new stories with the popularity of Ordinals, attracting many veteran developers to return. In addition, EDX Markets, recently supported by top traditional financial giants, launched trading of four tokens, including BCH, and BCH was not classified as a security by the SEC, while several PoS tokens were classified as securities. Is this a short-lived manipulative rally or a narrative revival and even value return of the cryptocurrency industry? It is still too early to say.