One Bitcoin Cash address responsible for over half of all transactions

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Someone keeping an eye on Bitcoin Cash (BCHABC) transactions has noticed something intriguing. Over the course of April, more than 50% of all BCHABC transactions were conducted by a single address. Further investigation of the activity seems to indicate an unsettling pattern.

Twitter user “IamNomad” pointed out the strange activity. He linked to the address as it appears on the Bitcoin Cash Block Explorer, which shows that over 587,000 transactions have been logged by the address since it appeared on April 8. Making things even more interesting, many of the transactions are fractional transactions for extremely low amounts that are made regularly, which seem to indicate an attempt to obfuscate the activity and not draw undue attention. That attempt has apparently backfired.

The address has sent about $24,546 and has received around almost $26,000 and is still seeing movement. Its current balance is approximately $1,235, which is higher than Monday’s balance by only around $19.

The BCH blockchain has processed around 1.18 million transactions and this address is responsible for almost half. There are a lot of theories floating around as to what is going on, but there is one that stands out. Some BCH enthusiast, or possibly a group of enthusiasts, is artificially inflating the number of transactions on the blockchain by conducting these microtransactions in an effort to make the network look more active and, thus, more important than it truly is.

Another theory is that it could be something like craft.cash and could be developers testing on the network in preparation of the launch of some game. As one Reddit user pointed out, though, “You cannot do computation with OP_RETURN unlike ETH, which means you need an external game server that handles state changes and control tokens. It’s a fancy way to send actions to the game server while keeping game item ownership outside the game server. You then need to send tokens back and forth with the game addresses and this ends up taking a lot of space on the blockchain. Sure it’s 1sat/byte, but that will quickly add up if you do lots of in-game actions.”

However, the address has now been active for more than 24 hours, which is more than enough time for any testing to take place. In addition, if it is testing, it should be done on the testnet, not the mainnet. The transactions are now a permanent record on the blockchain and will always have resulted in BCH showing inflated, unrealistic numbers.