Make Crypto Utility Great Again — BCH Bliss conference wraps in Slovenia

Like it or hate it, the little-engine-that-could network known as Bitcoin Cash is still chugging along and gaining focus, if embattled, momentum in the form of an upgraded network and even more smart contract efficiency. At the end of the three-day BCH Bliss 2025 conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, participants are fired up about the improved P2P engine, adoption, real-world utility, and privacy in an often vapid, strictly number-go-up crypto climate.  In the wake of the Bitcoin Cash 2025 network upgrade two days ago, and the coinciding celebration at the BCH Bliss conference in Slovenia, devs, entrepreneurs, merchants, and BCH users are wending their way back out into the normie, fiat world to spread the now ages-old (in crypto years) gospel of Satoshi. The Bitcoin Cash network has a relatively short but turbulent history, and one which is in some respects unrivaled as far as community enthusiasm, philosophy, and principle. Recent years have seen striking unity and focus, with the addition of smart contracts via the 2023 CashTokens upgrade, and a flourishing of new wallets, protocols, and products. The 2024 Adjustive Blocksize Limit Algorithm (ABLA) further cemented this trend, allowing for the network capacity to adjust automatically to use. While Bliss speakers noted that network usage is nowhere close to where they want it to be, what’s notable about BCH is that it is still actually used as permissionless, peer-to-peer cash, in a sea of market-cap-leading cryptos that have become little more than speculative gambling.

BCH Bliss 2025, focused on network utility and speed

John Nieri, president of General Protocols, the UTXO blockchain development company behind the popular BCH Bull DeFi platform, told Cryptopolitan: “This is the beginning of the age of the BCH entrepreneur.” Nieri, known as Emergent Reasons in the community, said of the 2025 network change: “The engine has been seriously upgraded. There are more coming, but the power available now is enough to move mountains. Next we need wallets and apps that put that power into the the hands of a huge number of people and organizations.”

The upgrades Nieri speaks of dovetail with CHIPs (Cash Improvement Proposals), which deal with virtual-machine limits and larger integers, streamlining smart-contract capability and efficiency on BCH. While the network has enjoyed UTXO-based smart contract functionality since 2023, according to developer Jason Dreyzehner, the now-live 2025 VELMA upgrade opens up use cases such as, “More advanced automated market making and exchange protocols, decentralized stablecoins, collateralized loan protocols, cross-chain and sidechain bridges, zero-knowledge proofs, post-quantum cryptography, homomorphic encryption, and more.” Mathieu Geukens, Cashonize wallet and Cauldron DEX developer, said on day three of the conference:

“I think it just removes headache for developers. Because for example, with Cauldron, we were discussing at some point like an overflow behavior where if you have a lot of tokens and a lot of BCH in a micro-pool … you can only go up to 64-bit integers — then your financial contracts you have to worry about. You have to consider, ‘oh can it overflow, will the transaction just fail?’ And that just removed this headache and worry.”

Synthetic assets and the battle for privacy and adoption

The Bitcoin Cash community is known for its passionate support of values also held by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Permissionlessness. Anonymity. Separation of money and state. Kallisti, a developer of the Selene Wallet for Bitcoin Cash, which also supports CashTokens NFTs on the network, shared his thoughts on day three of Bliss, on being publicly verifiable, and the state of crypto in the USA under a Trump regime:

“Just because you’re doxxed doesn’t mean that you’re trustworthy. Not necessarily … I think it’d be great to have more anons in the community … As far as government crackdown and what not, in some degree I don’t feel the fear as much in the US and on the other hand the current US administration is very unpredictable, so we never know if tomorrow they just decide, ‘yeah we’re just gonna ban crypto’ even though Trump was in the BTC Nashville conference last year and praising everything about BTC right — but politicians are always just saying what we wanna hear, right?”

Kallisti’s comments came in reply to the thoughts of Dagur Valberg, a dev behind the Moria USD (MUSD) stablecoin on Bitcoin Cash, who lamented the extremely draconian situation for crypto privacy currently unfolding in the European Union. Valberg noted that he does fear being attacked by the state, saying: “Oh it’s definitely kind of risky, especially in the EU,” continuing: “There’s a lot of regulatory stuff coming up and you never know if the governments are going to retroactively punish you. You just have to hope they’re not. It would definitely be better to be anonymous, and if I had the option to choose again I would be anonymous.”

Geukens, for his part, added, “By 2027 they want to have all privacy coins banned in the EU,” with BCH Bliss organizer and Bitcoin Cash Podcast Host Jeremy noting that doxxing and popular support can be a kind of “double-edged sword.”

Self-labeled Agorist and popular social media personality Sal Mayweather was also in attendance, and said one area BCH needs to improve on is privacy. This has been a common theme echoed by others, but typically overlooks the already active and easy to use CashFusion protocol available for Bitcoin Cash, as well as improvements on the horizon which could leverage covenants to run XMR and other privacy tech directly onchain. As dev Dreyzener noted back in January: “Covenants already enable any ‘layer 1’ technology: zkVMs, Monero (inc. Full-Chain Membership Proofs), Zcash, Mimblewimble, etc. The 2026 proposals make these truly practical: from messy, multi-MB transaction chains to cheap, atomic transactions sent from any wallet.” Another important metric for privacy and autonomy is adoption via decentralized markets of tokenized “synthetic assets.” The unveiling of a new stablecoin and loan protocol called ParityUSD generated marked interest at Bliss. Tokyo Bitcoin Cash Meetup organizer BigV shared his thoughts with Cryptopolitan on this model’s potential. “The parity/overcollateralized loan approach is interesting to me as it can be used to create synthetic assets to track anything — not just dollars but gold, or anything (e.g. trad-fi stocks).” He continued:

“Then we could create permissionless synthetic markets open to everyone — which could theoretically enable normal people to create massive unrelated markets that compete directly with the regulated ones dominated by banking cartels. So we could end up having huge synthetic markets being the tail that wags the trad-fi dog!”

Pain points, solutions, and the road forward

BCH Bliss attendees and speakers were not afraid to confront the realities of the present: draconian regulation, crypto being bought up and co-opted by politicians and banksters, relatively low network usage, and the ever pressing need for greater and greater privacy to stay ahead of entities seeking to stifle economic freedom. The controversial social media personality Mayweather also spoke words that — regardless of the speaker — resonated with Voluntaryists, Agorists, and anarchists everywhere, emphasizing a decided antipathy toward fiat-pegged stablecoins, and a laser focus on privacy and permissionless, P2P transactions.

Valberg expressed some reservations about potential downfalls of loop implementation in the codebase, and Geukens addressed the topic of network bloat via non-standard use of transactions, which could be enabled by the Pay to Script CHIP currently on the table. Geukens pointed to the popular Ordinal inscriptions NFT trend which has been clogging up the already congested rival network BTC in recent years and driving up fees. Currently BCH non-fungible tokens have metadata stored off-chain, but onchain storage would become easier with the future removal of bytecode limitations. Kallisti expressed a desire to keep BCH mining somewhat standardized and the network efficient, while Valberg said he was not a fan of storing art directly onchain. Geukens detailed:

“It is a nuanced debate, and reasonable people could fall on either side. So I think one thing is that you don’t need to go from 220 bytes to no limit at all. We could do like steps and see, reevaluate. Also, the filters they do work to some extent. You have Mara Slipstream on BTC. But on BCH I don’t think we have any kind of service, so if you wanted to put your current token metadata fully onchain that would be non-standard, so you would have to team up with a miner. This is a real hurdle, so that’s why we don’t see it. But if you remove this hurdle and it becomes 10x easier then people will definitely do it.”

Jeremy noted the voluntary and permissionless nature of the chain as a data storage network for anyone willing to pay the fees, but asked about potential community battles fought over the so-called proper use of the network — whether it is about P2P cash first and foremost, and not arbitrary jpeg storage. To learn more about the CHIPs process and future Bitcoin Cash upgrades, please see this resource.

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