Filipino Crypto Apps and Exchanges Lay Out Plans for Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork

BitPinas has talked with various Philippine-based crypto exchanges and wallets on how they are going to handle the bitcoin cash split.

November 12, 2018. Disagreement within the bitcoin cash community is going to culminate in a hard fork, a split of one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. Numerous wallets and exchanges have already expressed how they are going to proceed with this fork.

BitPinas has talked with various Philippine-based crypto exchanges and wallets on how they are going to handle the bitcoin cash split.

Coins.ph & Abra Lay Out Plans About the Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork

At the moment, the two major apps that support bitcoin cash are Coins.ph and Abra.

Coins.ph

Coins.ph supports Bitcoin Cash on their wallet app and cryptocurrency exchange.

Coins.ph explained why a potential fork is going to happen to Bitcoin Cash on November 16, 2018. While there’s a scheduled network upgrade on bitcoin cash, there are several protocol upgrades which have not yet gained widespread consensus within the community.

Coins.ph said it will suspend all bitcoin cash functionality on Coins.ph and Coins Pro on November 15, 2018 at 11:00 pm. Once the fork happens, Coins will save a record of the user’s bitcoin cash balance. Coins will decide if there is enough support for the minority token that resulted from the fork. If it decides not to support the minority token, it will provide a redemption period to claim them.

In the past, when bitcoin splits into bitcoin and bitcoin cash, Coins chose to convert the bitcoin cash resulting from the fork into bitcoin for their users. The period between the bitcoin hard fork up to the actual redemption took weeks.

Abra

Abra takes a similar approach when it comes to the bitcoin cash hard fork. According to their blog, bitcoin cash activity is suspended starting from November 15, 2018 at 8:00 am PST. Users must withdraw all bitcoin cash before that time if they wish to access it. During the fork, seeing the balances might be unavailable as well.

All bitcoin cash activity is suspended until the bitcoin cash network is stable. After the hard fork, Abra will determine which of the fork it will follow. The minor fork, and the resulting tokens from it will be assessed first before giving the users access to it.

In the past, Abra supported a one-time conversion of bitcoin cash to bitcoin after the bitcoin hard fork. This happened at that time when Abra is not yet supporting bitcoin cash.

SCI & VHCEX Will Follow User Demand

SCI Ventures

SCI Ventures, the company behind bitcoin app Bitbit.cash said the fork has not affected the development of Citadax, SCI’s upcoming cryptocurrency exchange. As with future support for bitcoin cash, or whatever tokens result from its fork, according to Miguel Cuneta, its co-founder & chief community officer:

“We will go with market demand when considering decisions such as listing or adding new coins to the wallet or exchange. If our users demand it, we can provide”.

VHCEX

VHCEX, one of the latest companies (and the first pure crypto exchange) to obtain a virtual currency exchange license from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said it will evaluate both emerging assets before proceeding. BitPinas has learned of this exchange’s plans to support bitcoin cash but now has to wait and see. According to VHCEX co-founder Jenn Lim:

“The listing will depend on the liquidity and the popularity of both assets after the split.”

MergeCommit

MergeCommit has developed Andromeda, designed for businesses and companies who want their own cryptocurrency exchange.

BitPinas has sought a comment from MergeCommit because while it does not own an exchange, they build exchanges (among other services) for clients. According to CEO James Florentino, the bitcoin cash hard fork is not an issue for them because their “tech stack allows us to support all currencies,” he said in a message sent to BitPinas. “It’s just a question of whether or not our enterprise customers would want to add fork coins into their exchanges.”

Overall

While bitcoin cash is on the verge of splitting, it is therefore important to know if wallets and apps supporting bitcoin cash in the Philippines have a position, or at least have plans on how to before and after the fork. This article will be updated as we get more responses from PH-based exchanges and apps.

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