Fundstrat issues updated report on Bitcoin SV and Metanet

Fundstrat Global Advisors, the New York-based leading independent market strategy and sector research firm, have released their latest report analyzing Bitcoin SV (BSV). Read a summary of the report here (which includes a link to print the full report).

The February 18 report discusses BSV supporters’ vision for going “beyond digital money, towards an on-chain internet”—known as the Metanet, a new Internet powered by the Bitcoin SV blockchain. The paper, authored by David Grider, begins by noting BSV’s recent “Genesis” hard fork protocol changes provide positive steps toward building a Metanet that may position BSV for greater adoption, while also noting that it may take time before the design’s ultimate viability is fully proven out. While Bitcoin Core (BTC) have focused on financial transactions and Ethereum has focused on building a world computer, Fundstrat notes that Bitcoin SV envisions a Metanet for both uses.

Fundstrat’s report summarized key protocol changes activated by Bitcoin SV’s Genesis hard fork—including eliminating any default block size limit (previously set at 2GB) so that “miners can institute larger block sizes to accommodate higher transaction throughput, as market forces demand.” In addition, the Genesis hard fork restored certain functions of the Bitcoin Script language to enable more complex transactions so that “BSV can more easily be used for data, token, and content delivery applications rather than just payments.” Finally, Genesis establishes stable protocol rules: “The BSV development team has stated that, after Genesis, no major protocol rule changes will be made. This is expected to result in a predictable development environment for years to come.”

Among the reasons for caution, Fundstrat notes that “more complex functionality may increase code vulnerability risks.” They also believe that unlimited scaling might still be a ways down the road, as “miners will likely continue to impose caps which may limit scaling in practice.”

The research firm also notes that BSV shows signs of an emerging transaction fee economy replacing the block reward motivation of the BTC chain with a transaction fee economy. With data transaction volume rising on BSV, top mining pools recently began experimenting with lower and alternative transaction fee models to ignite growth within the BSV ecosystem. Fundstrat noted the reduced BSV transactions fees being offered by both TAAL and CoinGeek Mining as an incentive that could drive transaction volume and higher aggregate fees in the future.

The report also notes that the price of BSV has significantly outperformed since the November 2018 emergence of BSV; in that time period, BSV’s price has risen 288%, while BTC has only risen 85% (as of February 13, 2020).

The takeaway from Fundstrat’s latest report is that: “It’s still early days for cryptocurrency technology and there is little certainty what the winning implementation will be. The BSV community is taking steps to position BSV as a scalable and robust platform with a focus on growing network adoption.”

There may be no better time to see what comes next than at CoinGeek London, due to take place later this week on February 20-21. Find out everything about the first big BSV conference of the year and get a peek at what big news you can expect by visiting the official CoinGeek Conference site.