BCH gears up for Bliss 2025 conference in Slovenia, network upgrade in May

The BCH Bliss 2025 conference is set for May 13-15 this year, seeing devs, users, and supporters of all backgrounds ready to converge on Ljubljana, Slovenia to talk developments on Bitcoin Cash. Though the cryptosphere at large has been inundated with politics as of late (with resultant meager coverage of tech), several important smart contract upgrades to the Bitcoin Cash network are set to go live in May.  Bitcoin Cash supporters have been busy buying up so-called “Velma” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) this year, in order to attend the the BCH Bliss 2025 conference, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The name “Velma” is a phonetic nod to the features of the coming May 2025 upgrade, which deals with Virtual Machine Limits (VML). 2024’s upgrade, which implemented an “Adaptive Blocksize Limit Algorithm,” was playfully meme’d into the attractive, yet non-existent celeb called “Jessica ABLA.”

BCH Bliss 2025 to focus on Velma upgrade, adoption

As reported previously, the Velma upgrade use cases, according to Bitcoin Cash devs, include: “…more advanced automated market making and exchange protocols, decentralized stablecoins, collateralized loan protocols, cross-chain and sidechain bridges” and  “zero-knowledge proofs” among other features. Essentially, this year’s upgrade seeks to continue streamlining and building out capabilities that were added with the Cashtokens upgrade in 2023, which enabled UTXO (unspent transaction output)-based smart contracts and token creation on the Bitcoin Cash network for negligible fees.

Tickets for the conference this year take the form of non-fungible “Velma” tokens sold largely on the BCH tokens marketplace Tapswap. A tentative list of speakers has been announced already, featuring miners, app developers, and other prominent figures in the BCH ecosystem focusing on increasing global adoption of the peer-to-peer cash.

Political sensationalism not deterring development, privacy

While it’s near impossible to read the news these days and not be flooded with partisan politics and polemics, important wallet integrations, stablecoin protocols, and smart contract features continue to develop under the mass media radar on many crypto networks, including Bitcoin Cash. For example, the popular, Philippines-based Paytaca Wallet has just announced a feature (still in early alpha mode) which allows users to stabilize their BCH in dollar value at anytime, in-app, via an integration with BCHBull, a smart-contract based hedging and speculation platform created by Bitcoin Cash developer group General Protocols. This addition complements recent updates to BCHBull itself, and a BCH-based stablecoin experiment called Moria Money.

When asked by Cryptopolitan for their thoughts on the upgrade and Bliss conference, Bitcoin Cash Tokyo Meetup organizer and Bliss 2024 attendee BigV noted:

“Bliss 2024 had an impressive global reach with attendees flying into Slovenia from all over the world, with a significant number of BCH community activists, developers, enthusiasts and business owners from Japan, which has always been a hot spot for Bitcoin Cash … Bliss 2025 and the May upgrade removes several ‘blockers’ that have to date prevented many of Satoshi’s [bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s] unfinished Bitcoin Script ideas, delivering a highly efficient, elegant and practical platform upon which to develop the next generation of decentralised finance applications.”

The Tokyo meetup organizer also mentioned “significant efficiency and deployment advantages” over competing EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-based chains “which do not scale effectively and existing privacy coins which are less attractive due to the existence of pre-mined tokens hoarded by the ‘foundation,’ tail-emmission inflation and privacy algorithms that are entrenched at the base layer.” Further, with the CashFusion privacy protocol, BigV notes BCH “is thus uniquely positioned to not just be money for the world, but to enable access to powerful permissionless decentralised financial tools to every human on earth.”