Bitcoin Cash 2025 Velma Upgrade Enhances Smart Contract Capabilities
The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network is set to undergo a significant upgrade with the Velma hard fork on May 15, 2025. This upgrade is not just another routine patch but a strategic enhancement aimed at expanding BCH's smart contract functionalities, driven by community-proposed improvements known as CHIP-2021-05 and CHIP-2024-07.
The upgrade coined "VELMA" (Virtual Machine Limits) introduces changes that will affect how developers interact with the BCH blockchain. By relaxing the virtual machine limits, which were originally set in 2010, the upgrade allows for transactions that are more complex and resource-intensive. This change is important for developers who aim to build sophisticated decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and applications.
Enhancements in Smart Contract Functionality
The removal of the 64-bit integer limit further empowers developers by facilitating larger and more precise calculations, which are essential for advanced cryptographic operations and financial models. These adjustments are not merely technical tweaks; they represent a leap towards making BCH a more versatile platform for developers. The increase in stack element size from 520 bytes to 10,000 bytes, for instance, allows for more data to be processed within a single transaction, thus enabling more powerful smart contracts. The introduction of new limits for operation spending, hashing, and control stack usage, coupled with a robust test suite for security, ensures that this expansion in capability does not compromise the network's integrity.
The upgrade's focus on high-precision arithmetic, through the implementation of CHIP-2024-07, opens up new avenues for Bitcoin Cash in areas like zero-knowledge proofs and quantum-resistant cryptography. This capability enhances privacy and security, making Bitcoin Cash a more attractive option for those concerned with the confidentiality and resilience of their transactions against future technological threats.
The seamless integration of these features into the BCH ecosystem means that users will experience no disruption. The upgrade activates automatically on the network, requiring no action from individual users or wallet holders. They will, however, benefit from the resultant increase in application quality and security, as developers leverage these new tools to innovate and build.
Jason Dreyzehner, a key figure in the BCH development community and the mind behind these two CHIPs, emphasizes the potential of these changes. He notes that the VM Limits CHIP not only extends computational capacity by over 100 times but also reduces node compute usage by 50%, simplifying smart contracts and enhancing security. The BigInt CHIP, on the other hand, significantly reduces contract lengths and introduces previously theoretical use cases into practical application, promising advancements in automated market making, stablecoins, and more.
This upgrade, therefore, not only positions BCH more competitively in the crypto space but also invites developers to explore and expand what's possible on this platform. With these enhancements, BCH is set to offer capabilities that surpass those of other major platforms in terms of efficiency, security, and scalability, all while maintaining compatibility and simplicity at the protocol level.