Bitcoin SV (BSV)

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Historical price evolution of Bitcoin SV

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

The origins of Bitcoin SV trace back to the controversial claims of Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist and founder of nChain, who on 8th December 2015 was identified as a possible Satoshi Nakamoto in simultaneous articles by Wired and Gizmodo. The evidence presented was immediately questioned by the Bitcoin community. Subsequently, on 2nd May 2016, Wright publicly declared himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto on his blog, accompanying the declaration with supposed cryptographic proof that experts quickly discredited upon finding that it did not sign with the genesis block keys. Wright closed his blog days later.

Bitcoin SV (BSV) emerged on 15th November 2018 as a result of a hard fork from Bitcoin Cash (BCH), originating from a conflict that pitted Bitcoin ABC (backed by Roger Ver and Jihan Wu of Bitmain, with 32MB blocks) against Bitcoin SV (led by Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre, with 128MB blocks). BSV debuted at approximately $96.50 versus BCH's $289. In December 2018, a researcher detected that it was possible to perform double spending on BSV transactions with 0 confirmations, exposing a security flaw in the network.

During 2019, controversy intensified when Wright registered the Bitcoin whitepaper and original source code copyrights in April with the US Copyright Office, although the Office clarified that registration did not imply recognition of authorship. Between April and June, major exchanges began removing BSV: Binance announced delisting on 15th April, calling Wright a fraud, followed by Kraken and ShapeShift between 22nd April and 5th June. BSV's price fell from £55 to £39 in one week. In June, Wright sued Norwegian user Hodlonaut (Magnus Granath) for defamation in the United Kingdom after he published criticisms of his claims, whilst Granath counter-sued in Norway requesting courts confirm that Wright is not Satoshi. In July, the Quasar Protocol update raised the maximum block size from 128MB to 2GB.

Technical development continued in 2020, when BSV experienced its first halving on 10th April, reducing block reward from 12.5 to 6.25 BSV. During that year, BSV processed a 369MB block with 1.3 million transactions, reporting an average of 300 TPS with peaks of 2,800 TPS on mainnet. On 16th April 2021, BSV reached its all-time high of approximately $490. However, between June and August 2021, BSV suffered three 51% attacks where attackers took control of more than 50% of the hashrate, achieving double spending of coins. BSV's hashrate represented barely 0.05% of Bitcoin's. In November 2021, Coinbase removed BSV from its platform.

Court cases were progressively resolved against Wright. In October 2022, the Norwegian court ruled in favour of Granath declaring that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. That same year, a British court ordered Wright to pay £1 in nominal damages in his lawsuit against podcaster Peter McCormack, considering that Wright was not a truthful witness and presented deliberately false evidence. The culminating point came during the COPA (Crypto Open Patent Alliance) trial before the High Court of London between February and March 2024, where more than 20 forgeries in Wright's evidence were documented, including documents with Grammarly marks and typography that did not exist in 2007. On 14th March 2024, Judge James Mellor declared in court that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, is not the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, did not create the Bitcoin system and did not write the initial versions of the software. On 20th May 2024, the judge published his written judgment of 231 pages, concluding that Wright committed perjury on a large scale and deliberately produced false documents, imposing a worldwide prohibition for Wright to claim to be Satoshi and referring the case to the Crown Prosecution Service to evaluate perjury charges.

Despite these judicial resolutions, in October 2024 Wright filed a new $1,180 million lawsuit against Bitcoin Core developers, alleging that the SegWit and Taproot upgrades deviated from Satoshi's original protocol and that BSV is the true Bitcoin. In parallel, lawsuits related to the 2019 delisting continued their course: on 21st May 2025, the UK Court of Appeal partially dismissed the $11,900 million class action lawsuit filed by BSV investors against Binance, Kraken, ShapeShift and Bittylicious, considering that speculative gains are not legally recoverable. Finally, on 8th December 2025, the UK Supreme Court rejected the BSV investors' appeal, definitively closing the legal avenue for the $13,000 million against the exchanges.

Bitcoin SV functions as a fork of Bitcoin Cash that emerged on 15th November 2018 which maintains the SHA-256 mining algorithm and the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, with a maximum supply limited to 21 million units. Its distinctive technical characteristic lies in the expanded block size: it began with 128MB blocks in 2018, expanded to 2GB following the 2019 Quasar upgrade, remaining without an official size limit after that upgrade. This architecture allows the network to theoretically process up to 50,000 transactions per second according to the project's estimates, maintaining transaction costs of fractions of a penny due to the greater processing capacity per block.

At a functionality level, BSV reactivated opcodes from Bitcoin's original script that were disabled in the main implementation, which enables additional capabilities such as token creation, basic smart contracts and direct data storage on the blockchain. However, the network operates with a considerably lower hashrate than Bitcoin's, which has resulted in documented security vulnerabilities, including three 51% attacks recorded in 2021. Following the March 2024 court ruling that declared that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, and the delistings from exchanges such as Binance and Kraken in 2019 and Coinbase in 2024, the network currently functions with reduced liquidity and a limited development ecosystem.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.