In May 2017, Bitcoin transactions could take up to four days to complete. The only way to make a transaction quicker was to pay a transaction fee, which at the end of 2017 was around $28. The delay and the need to pay fees made Bitcoin impractical for making small purchases, which led to a new Bitcoin-based currency Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

BCH is a cryptocurrency established as a result of the hard fork that took place to manage the scalability problem. Bitcoin Cash has a number of significant differences to Bitcoin: it is advertised as being faster and cheaper to use, the maximum block size is eight megabytes against one in previous Blockchain, and it has an emergency difficulty adjustment feature. Bitcoin Cash also uses 0-conf (or zero-conf) which allows for nearly instant transactions, meaning Bitcoin Cash transactions are almost always confirmed in the next block.