Kraken announces support for Bitcoin Cash Node as hard fork looms

Hard forks are contentious. After all, why wouldn’t they be? The latest example of the same is Bitcoin Cash’s likely hard fork that is scheduled for the 15th of November. In preparation for the same, many of the market’s entities have been putting out statements revealing their action plan after the 15th. Hot on the heels of Trezor, popular crypto-exchange Kraken is the latest to do so.

In a recent blog post, the San Francisco-based crypto-exchange revealed that regardless of the outcome of the scheduled protocol upgrade, it will be supporting Bitcoin Cash Node. The expected split is likely to be between two protocols – Bitcoin Cash Node and Bitcoin Cash ABC. According to Kraken, “70% of blocks are signaling for Bitcoin Cash Node while less than 1% are signaling for Bitcoin Cash ABC, so Bitcoin Cash Node looks like it will be the dominant chain by far.”

At the time of writing, the share for the former for the last 1000 blocks had risen to over 80%.

Source: CoinDance

The split in question centers around a proposal to have mining rewards fund developers. While the ABC camp supports this proposal, having already introduced an IFP to the codebase, others in opposition constitute the Bitcoin Cash Node camp.

However, that’s not all, as contrary to the expectations of many supporting BCH ABC, Kraken also revealed that Bitcoin Cash Node tokens will be called “Bitcoin Cash” on the platform while also being given the ticker symbol, BCH. On the other hand, Bitcoin Cash ABC will only be supported if its hashpower is at least 10% of the hashpower on the BCHN Network. Even then, it will be traded as Bitcoin Cash ABC under the ticker symbol BAB.

With such an announcement, Kraken has joined the likes of Coinbase as exchanges that have announced their support for the Bitcoin Cash Node network. In fact, Coinbase went as far as ruling out future support for Bitcoin Cash ABC.

These developments are interesting since they come on the back of Trezor taking a very indecisive stance. After announcing that it will not be immediately supporting any coin split from the resultant hard fork, Trezor said that it might take time for a consensus to be reached. However, with over 80% of blocks already signaling for BCH Node, it might not be long before Trezor makes another announcement.