Bitcoin Cash's New Token Machine Gun: Inside Wormhole's Quest to Dethrone ERC-20

Last week, Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver and lead developer Corbin Frasers unveiled a new tool which allows developers to issue tokens on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, hosted on their publication.

"For better or worse, ICOs and CryptoKitties are probably coming to Bitcoin Cash in the near future," Fraser said half-jokingly, to which Ver optimistically added that "They are probably coming to Bitcoin.com, too," hinting that his publication might hold an ICO based on new tokens.

The overwhelming majority of those tokens are built on the Ethereum network - they constitute nearly 83 percent of the whole token market, according to data obtained from ICOWatchList.

Basically, ERC-20 outlines a common list of rules that an ETH token has to follow, giving developers the ability to program how new tokens will function within the Ethereum ecosystem - for instance, to determine the total amount of issued tokens.

Basically, you just have to copy-paste a template from GitHub, choose a total amount of tokens, their name and symbol, pump some gas and ETH in and a new token is born.

Although most ERC-20 tokens have not been applied for direct use, some of them, like Basic Attention and 0x tokens, are still being reviewed to be listed by major, law-compliant exchanges like Coinbase, despite their unclear regulatory status.

Thus, Roger Ver's plan mentioned above is to simplify token issuance on Bitcoin Cash's rails and host it on Bitcoin.com.

It also supports native tokens called Wormhole Cash.

Those tokens are the fuel for smart contracts on the BCH blockchain and are hence required for actions like creating new tokens or listing an ICO. WCH is generated through a proof-of-burn mechanism - to get 100 WCH, a user is required to send one BCH to the burn address.

There are three types of those tokens - namely, tokens with a fixed number, tokens with a managed number and tokens for crowdsale/ICOs.