Crypto community gears up for Bitcoin Cash’s upcoming hard fork

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is inching closer to the planned network upgrade via hard fork scheduled on November 15.

While the outcome of the fork is not clear at the moment, there are chances that it could lead to a permanent split in the network – essentially creating two versions of the Bitcoin Cash chain.

A number of cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bibox, Binance, Coinbase Pro, HitBTC, Huobi, OKEx, Upbit, have announced their plans to support the upcoming hard fork.

Kraken said that it will then monitor the situation in the weeks and months after the fork and evaluate the possibility of supporting an alternative chain.

Circle-owned Poloniex last week announced that it is offering pre-fork trading of the two planned protocol upgrades, Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHABC) and Bitcoin Cash SV (BCHSV). HitBTC started offering pre-for trading for BCHABC and BCHSV on November 9.

However, Craig Wright said that allowing “naked shorts” – the practice of short selling tradable assets that have not been affirmatively determined to exist – is a criminal offence in the United States.

Bitcoin payment processor BitPay has announced that it does not have any plans to migrate from the Bitcoin ABC implementation of Bitcoin Cash to a different implementation.

“In the event of a chain split resulting from the hard fork, the BitPay wallet will only support the Bitcoin Cash chain on which we resume to process payments for BitPay merchants. We do not currently have plans to make new tokens from the split available in the BitPay wallet,” it said.