OKEx, Still Paralyzed by Founder’s Arrest, Details Plans for Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork

Cryptocurrency deposit withdrawals are still suspended at the OKEx exchange following a founder’s recent arrest, but officials with the Malta-based company are moving ahead with other matters, including planning around an upcoming hard fork on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

• The BCH hard fork expected Nov. 15 is a result of a blockchain update proposal in August from a group known as Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCH ABC), led by Amaury Sechet.
• Among other changes, Sechet and his team plan to introduce a new “Coinbase Rule,” which requires 8% of mined BCH to be redistributed to Bitcoin ABC as a means of financing protocol development.
• This change is, however, opposed by Roger Ver, executive chairman of mining pool Bitcoin.com and the Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN).
• “Diverting part of the #BitcoinCash block reward to pay a single development team is a Soviet style central planner’s dream come true,” Ver wrote in a tweet. “Please stop.”
• OKEx said Oct. 28 in a post on its website that in the event of a successful fork, holders of BCH will receive two new assets, BCH ABC and BCHN.
• “After the fork is completed, we will refer to the trading prices of the forked currency pairs on major exchanges and select the chain with the higher price to inherit the BCH name. The tokens of the other chain will be airdropped to users' funding accounts at a 1:1 ratio.”
• Futures and perpetual swaps on BCH will “follow one of the forks,” according to the document.
• “In principle, the underlying asset of the post-fork contracts will be the more expensive post-fork asset, determined by the post-fork spot market on various major crypto exchanges,” it added.
• As of press time, of the last 1,000 blocks mined on Bitcoin Cash, about 70% have signaled support for BCHN, and only 0.2% for Bitcoin ABC, according to data from Coin Dance.
• OKEx CEO Jay Hao told CoinDesk in a Telegram message that the two groups “hold very different ideas about the proposed miner tax.”
• “OKEx understands that in the blockchain space, core developers have differences of opinion over the best way to fund development, growth, continued innovation, and future direction,” Hao said. “Of course, it's always preferable when an agreement can be reached and a change implemented via a soft fork.”
• All withdrawal activities on OKEx remain suspended after the exchange said earlier this month that a holder of a private key needed to authorize withdrawals had been out of touch while “cooperating with a public security bureau in investigations.”
• The Chinese news source Caixin reported that an OKEx founder, Mingxing “Star” Xu, had been taken into police custody.