Bitcoin Cash Users Move $257 Million of BCH to Exchanges Ahead of Hard Fork

Bitcoin Cash users have moved over $257 million worth of BCH to cryptocurrency exchanges in the last seven days, ahead of the cryptocurrency’s contentious hard fork scheduled for November 15.

According to Chainalsysis’s chief economist, Phillip Gradwell, over 1 million bitcoin cash were sent to cryptocurrency trading platforms over the last seven days to be sold off for other cryptoassets, presumably as users expect volatility in BCH’s price during the hard fork.

A CryptoGlobe reported, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is set to undergo a hard fork that could lead to a chain split. The cryptocurrency’s community is divided over the introduction of a novel mining algorithm and the allocation of 8% of block rewards from BCH miners to the Bitcoin ABC development team.

Those who support the allocation have rallied behind Bitcoin ABC’s development team, while most other BCH nodes and miners started signaling for Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN). Some in the BCH community oppose the 8% allocation as they believed it goes against the cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature, and is even seen by some as a “tax” to the network.

While data shows that miners controlling over 80% of the cryptocurrency’s hashrate signal for BCHN, nodes are roughly even. Cryptocurrency exchanges were quick in reacting to the contentious hard fork, with most revealing they will give users who hold bitcoin Cash at the time of the fork the token corresponding to the other chain, if there is a split.

another token is created, however, some exchanges seemingly won’t support both tokens. Several top trading platforms have made it clear they will only support the blockchain with the most hashrate. Poloniex, which ahead of the BCH and BSV hard fork supported futures for both coins, has done the same thing this time with the launch of pre-fork trading.

The $257 million worth of BCH moved to cryptocurrency exchanges over the last few days could either be coming from users looking to sell their tokens to escape the volatility, or from users looking to receive an airdropped token in the event of a chain split.

Data seemingly suggests most users are selling their BCH, as the price of the cryptocurrency relative to bitcoin has been dropping. CryptoCompare data shows that in the last seven days 1 BCH went from 0.230 BTC to 0.0165 BTC.

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