Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin with a protocol upgrade to fix on-chain capacity. Bitcoin Cash intends to be a Bitcoin without Segregated Witness (SegWit) as soft fork, where upgrades of the protocol are done mainly through hard forks and without changing the original economic rules of the Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is released on 1st August 2017 as an upgraded version of the original Bitcoin Core software. The main upgrade is the increase in the block size limit from 1MB to 8MB. This effectively allows miners on the BCH chain to process up to 8 times more payments per second in comparison to Bitcoin. This makes for faster, cheaper transactions and a much smoother user experience. Why was Bitcoin Cash Created? The main objective of Bitcoin Cash is to to bring back the essential qualities of money inherent in the original Bitcoin software. Over the years, these qualities were filtered out of Bitcoin Core and progress was stifled by various people, organizations, and companies involved in Bitcoin protocol development. The result is that Bitcoin Core is currently unusable as money due to increasingly high fees per transactions and transfer times taking hours to complete. This is all because of the 1MB limitation of Bitcoin Core’s block size, causing it unable to accommodate to large number of transactions. Essentially Bitcoin Cash is a community-activated upgrade (otherwise known as a hard fork) of Bitcoin that increased the block size to 8MB, solving the scaling issues that plague Bitcoin Core today. Nov 16th 2018: A hashwar resulted in a split between Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC
Paxos Standard (PAX) was created by Paxos, a financial technology company on a mission to modernize finance by mobilizing assets at the speed of the internet. Paxos was the first virtual currency company to receive a charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services. As a chartered limited purpose trust company with fiduciary powers under the Banking Law, Paxos is able to offer regulated services in the crypto-asset and virtual commodities space. The Paxos team comes from a wide variety of backgrounds with a diverse array of experiences ranging from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. It’s led by CEO and co-founder Charles Cascarilla, who has spent his career as a customer, analyst, investor and now creator of financial technology. Paxos describes itself as “the first regulated Trust company with blockchain expertise”, and it is using that expertise to create a modern settlement solution that can eliminate risk and simplify settlements. What many people may not know about Paxos is that it was actually founded in 2012 as Paxos Trust Company, and that for most of its life it ran the cryptocurrency exchange itBit, which is still operates. The creation of Paxos was a pivot from an exchange platform to a company focused on creating a modern settlement platform using blockchain technology. Paxos has become the most widely adopted cryptocurrency in the fastest time frame, with support from over 20 exchanges and OTC desks in the first five weeks of its existence. It’s been picked up and listed by six of the top ten cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, OKEx, Gate.io, ZB, KuCoin and DigiFinex. These exchanges are offering PAX as an alternative to the controversial Tether. Unlike the controversy surrounding the people who control Tether, there is no such obscurity when it comes to the people behind Paxos. The CEO and co-founder is Charles Cascarilla. He has over 15 years in financial services and has co-founded Cedar Hill asset management back in 2005. He has also worked and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs prior to that. The Paxos Standard (PAX) is the first digital asset to be issued by a financial institution and to be fully secured by the U.S. dollar. While other similar stablecoins have existed, there has been no proof of full U.S. dollar reserves, nor have these earlier assets been issued by a financial institution. The Paxos team has been fairly clear in declaring the different base that PAX is working from.