Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) has seemingly temporarily split into three separate blockchains after an enormous 210 MB block was mined on its ‘main’ blockchain.

According to BitMEX research, several Bitcoin SV nodes seemingly went down while trying to process the 210 MB block, which ended up diving them into three groups and split the cryptocurrency’s blockchain.

BitMEX research later on clarified its Bitcoin SV node didn’t have sufficient memory for blocks as large as 210 MB and as such it had to launch a new one with twice the memory. It further found that out of 420 Bitcoin SV nodes, 17% were stuck on the large block.

A further 19% ended up staying on an older BSV chain that dates back to July 24, before the cryptocurrency’s network underwent a hard fork to increase its blocksize from 128 MB to 2 GB. 65% were on the latest block.

Available data shows the 210 MB block contained a total of 806,000 transactions, which rewarded the miners who found it – CoinGeek – with around $350 worth of BSV in fees. CoinGeek, as previously covered, has in the past been close to getting 51% of Bitcoin SV’s hashrate.

The cryptocurrency is a hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is itself a hard fork of Bitcoin (BTC). It forked off of the BCH network as its proponents believe there shouldn’t be a cap on the block size, and as such initially quadrupled BCH’s 32 MB blocks to 128 MBs.

Notably, some argue that larger block sizes make it harder for regular users to run a node on the network, which in turn compromises its centralization. On BSV, some node operators are now reporting running nodes is getting expensive, so much so only miners may in the future be incentivized to do so.

Ryan X. Charles, a BSV supporter and the CEO of MoneyButten, revealed through a blog post its BSV node ran out of money and crashed during a stress test, before adding “running a node is expensive.”

He wrote:

Our new instance will cost thousands of dollars per month to operate. As blocks continue to get larger and we have to upgrade the instance many times, this cost will balloon. Since we do not earn money from transaction fees like miners, it will be too expensive for us to run a node.

Despite the incident the price of Bitcoin SV has risen in the past 24 hours. CryptoCompare data shows the cryptocurrency is currently up by around 3% in said period, as it’s trading at $152.6. Its price performance may be following that of BTC itself, which is up 8.9% in the last 24 hours.