Digital Currency Exchanges on the Upcoming Ethereum Hardfork
Last week, Ethereum announced a hardfork following a relentless, month-long denial of service attack. The proposed hardfork will occur at block 2,463,000, expected to be mined today, October 16.
At the time of publishing, the Ethereum blockchain saw block #2,462,322 mined, by mining pool ethpool.
In the lead-up to the hardfork, cryptocurrency exchanges have sought to update customers on how they plan to respond and adapt to the Ethereum hard fork.
Prominent digital assets exchange Kraken has said that it expects the fork to occur without any disruption, “with the DOS-protected fork quickly becoming the dominant chain while the old vulnerable chain quickly dies out.”
Funding for Ethereum-related tokens, i.e. ETH, ETC, DAO and REP will be halted I nteh hours leading up to the fork.
The exchange explained why Ethereum Classic funding is also seeing a temporary suspension.
An ETC fork is planned for October 25th. However, there is some risk of an unintentional ETC fork along with the ETH fork, because many people are running normal ETH clients with the classic flag set. Due to these risks, ETC funding will also be halted while the outcome of the ETH fork is determined.
Furthermore, Kraken will only support balances and trading on the dominant chain, following the hard fork.
Another well-known exchange, Coinbase, informed customers of possible delays to ETH deposits and withdrawals from the exchange for the next seven days, following the hard fork. It stated:
This [hard fork] will likely cause ETH network instability for a period of time. Customers should expect delays to ETH deposits and withdrawals from Coinbase for up to the next 7 days.
Coinbase will also support only one blockchain of the Ethereum protocol, which it says will be determined “at our sole discretion, best reflects the consensus approach.” The San Francisco-based exchange also revealed, in no uncertain terms, that it will not support any other fork of the ETH protocol, after determining its chosen fork.
Also read: Ethereum Classic Divided Over the Proposed Hard fork
The exchange is also suspending Ethereum Classic withdrawals until after the ETH hard fork is resolved.
Poloniex, a popular alt.coins exchange assured customers that following the hard fork, customer balances will be automatically transferred to the new dominant chain.
The exchange added:
Keep in mind that as we near the fork, we will be temporarily disabling deposits and withdrawals in preparation for the migration process. Trading will continue to operate as normal during this period. Once the network is stable and the migration is complete, we will enable deposits and withdrawals. If for any reason you would like to keep your tokens from the old blockchain, you must remove your ETH from the platform before the fork occurs.
Images from Ethereum and Etherscan.
