Over the past few years there’ve been many broad and very public predictions of an impending market downturn. I remember starting to hear them back in 2017 when people were guessing a recession might happen within 6–12 months. Obviously, that never happened. It still hasn’t, but predictions have only grown stronger in conviction.

Why? Because markets keep hitting high after high without the supporting operating fundamentals. Logically, there has to be a top; a point where markets pull back.

What’s happening now

Now into 2020, we’ve had a bull run for more than a decade. The S&P 500 is at a record high. The Nasdaq Composite has also hit a record high. In January, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high.

So, what is today’s indicator that markets will head south?

Markets today are inflated by sentiment. While stock markets fluctuate on macro fundamentals like global and national economic conditions, they are also moved by sentiment. Sentiment isn’t something that can be quantified; it’s a feeling that investors share based on ideas and rumors which can lead to excitement, fear, and/or chaos. Because markets have been strong for so long, because there is significant political rhetoric aimed at increasing investor confidence, and because companies have been buying positive sentiment, investors have maintained a strong long position on the future — they’ve remained hopeful.

Too much hot air, too much bubble

A strong indicator of what’s to come is the “credit bubble.” Investors, consumers, corporations, and governments are holding a heck of a lot of debt. When you take on debt, you are making a commitment that future you can pay it back. Paying back debt usually means spending less. Today, the economy is being propped up by debt and there is fear brewing that some of the debt may not be able to be repaid. When interest rates are low for such a long time (they’ve been very low since the last recession), people get used to easy borrowing. The focus turns to borrowing instead of productivity (making money), meaning cash reserves are low and debt loads are high. Borrowers take on more credit to service existing debts. When interest rates increase or credit is cut off, there will likely be an issue repaying the debt.

For clarity, a recession is different from a market correction. Stock markets have regular corrections. Also called pullbacks and drawdowns, corrections are normal and expected. They respond to company news, trading volume, and world events. In contrast, a recession is what happens when an economy contracts, or shrinks, and everything pulls back. In the case of a recession, markets experience an extended down period (at least two consecutive quarters of declining performance across an entire economy). Short term recessions also happen with some regularity, so the term should be used with nuance. For context, the 2008–09 recession is often referred to as a “crisis,” because of how long lasting and detrimental it was.

And the credit goes to…

I understand the greatest concern today to be corporate America not being able to service its debt. Many corporations over-leveraged themselves by using cheap debt to finance stock buybacks in order to keep investors and board members happy. With stock buybacks, their mission was to drive up their stock price when operating results were poor. It’s literally throwing good money after bad, trying to change the result but only providing a quick band aid fix. Now there is concern that these massive corporations won’t have a way to pay the debt back.

But bad corporate results are being rescued by the buoy of hope, an artificial and short-lived life ring. We’ve seen stocks continue to trend up while the underlying companies haven’t increased their own fundamentals, like sustainable growth rate or revenue.

But not to be forgotten…

Consumers have also created their own debt bubble. Credit card debt is ever growing and becoming increasingly hard to pay off. But unlike corporate debt, consumer debt isn’t cheap. It’s crazy expensive. So the pain is far worse for the consumer who all of a sudden can’t manage debt repayment with a staggering interest rate that is compounding their level of debt. What might prevent someone from making their credit card payments? Losing their job. What might be the catalyst for job loss? Corporations who can’t pay back their debt.

This time around, I don’t think we’re going to see a recession anything like what happened in 2008. This is mostly because market activities leading up to 2008 went largely unregulated. After the 2008–09 crisis, regulation was put in place to avoid another such calamity. But regulation can only do so much, and in a capitalist environment, making money is the driving force. This means that a bubble will grow and at some point it will burst — it’s the capitalist cycle of bull and bear markets. Today’s credit bubble is smaller and a little softer than that of 2008–09’s housing bubble, but it will hurt. And while there’s no way of knowing exactly what will happen or when it will happen, it pays to understand what we’re dealing with.

Want to learn more about economic cycles and how it all works? This video is great at explaining how the economy works at a high level.

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Blockchain today is akin to the internet in the early 90s: nascent, under-appreciated, and poorly understood. Similar to the intranet predecessors of the internet, local and isolated networks with no means of communication with other systems or networks, blockchains lack the ability to interface or communicate with other systems or blockchains. As a result, blockchains as they exist today silo data, value, users, and information.

Widespread adoption of the internet wasn’t spurred until the advent of a communication and connection tool — email. It was only when people could readily communicate and transfer information with each other that the world began to understand the true potential of a global computer network.

The same is true for blockchain. To experience a similar phenomenon in adoption, blockchains must be able to connect and allow information to readily flow between them. Cross-chain communication will allow liquidity, users, and value to move freely throughout the ecosystem, enabling better a user experience, healthier markets, and new waves of innovation. Without it, blockchains will struggle to move from early stage intranets to the internet that we know today.

Containment: The Killer of Adoption

Until the invention of the internet, computer networks operated in containment, serving single organizations and private communities. These intranets, or private computer networks, provided benefit to their organizations, but also suffered from lack of openness.

Public and private blockchains have evolved in much the same way. With the state of blockchain technology today, companies must choose which blockchain to build on. This, in turn, exposes them to the disconnected state of the ecosystem today, limiting their potential features, user base, and attainable market. They seek solutions in two very familiar ways:

1. Private Chains — Intranets

The corporate intranets of the 1990s, suffered from the same issues that private computer networks did decades earlier; lack of openness. Corporate intranets struggled to manage the flow and relevancy of information because centralized authority created bottlenecks. They were limited in accuracy, relevance, and datedness of information. As such, intranets were more vulnerable to incorrect, biased, and dated information. This is true with anything that exists in isolation; it is limited to that of the contained system.

Today’s corporations who want to use blockchain technology still stumble with the inherent transparency. When it comes to managing their information while maintaining authority, some, like IBM and JP Morgan, choose to develop on private blockchains. These chains aren’t truly making use of the full potential of the technology. Instead, they are creating intranet-like solutions, which are essentially extremely inefficient databases.

“‘Private blockchains’ became ‘permissioned ledgers,’ essentially Google Sheets for the Enterprise.™”

— Matt Luongo, Project Lead at Keep, from Private and Permissioned Ledgers

2. Competing Public Blockchains — LANs

Until the early 90s, email systems functioned independently due to government restrictions imposed on commercial internet traffic. Email was host-based, based on local area networks (LANs), or sent via private mail networks. These services only allowed you to send mail to others using the same service.

Public blockchains have developed similarly. Instead of building a private ledger (like an intranet), projects have relied on new chains focused on delivering the feature sets they need (like LANs). But these chains also operate in containment, serving their ecosystems with a siloed perspective of what the technology can and should do.

Interoperability: The Spark of Adoption

Interoperability, the ability for blockchains to talk to each other, removes the barriers. Early proponents of a greater computer network championed the development of protocols for an email to be exchanged by disparate computers. In 1993, America Online (AOL) introduced an email service that connected its network with the rest of the internet.

Just four years later, in 1997, AOL was the largest provider of email in the world with around nine million users. AOL is seen as a pioneer of the internet because it understood the value of connecting people across systems; a better product and a larger user base. As a mechanism for cross-network communication, email had offered a mainstream use case and was a significant catalyst of growth for the internet.

“If we end up in a world of many blockchains, interoperability can make them more useful, user-friendly, efficient and scalable.”

— Aleks Larsen, Investments & Research, Blockchain Capital, in A Primer on Blockchain Interoperability

As with the internet and email, interoperability between blockchains will instigate greater utility. There are too many disconnected blockchains being built, with developers and users split amongst them. Cross-chain bridges provide connections between networks and their services, enabling a better user experience and the creation of more compelling products.

Interoperability will create a network of blockchains, and the greater network will supersede still-siloed chains whether private or otherwise. It’s the shift that will unleash the power of these disparate communities, and it’s not to be missed.

“A network of blockchains allows for network effects to improve the decentralized internet. When everything is connected, it brings more capital, a better user experience, and more minds brainstorming to improve the network.”
— Dave Kajpust, Blockchain Developer, in Blockchain Interoperability: Cosmos vs. Polkadot

We believe a world of connected blockchains will power the next leap for this industry. At Keep, we’re powering the technology behind this movement with privacy-preserving technologies built to be chain-agnostic. We invite you to join us!

Learn More

For more information about the Keep Network:

• Join us on Reddit.
• Check out our whitepaper.
• Read our business primer.
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• Follow us on Twitter.
• Join our Slack.
• Join our Telegram.

Cross-Chain Bridges are the Email of Blockchains was originally published in Keep Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“We’re only as secure as our most centralized component.” That’s a line from Keep’s Project Lead, Matt Luongo, who uses it to explain where issues lie within distributed network development. Through this lens, society today is not secure at all. In fact, we are exposed to massive risk. Our everyday actions across financial systems and many digital experiences expose us to inherent vulnerabilities.

Centralization vs. decentralization

Understanding the power of a distributed ledger brought the balance of centralization and decentralization into clearer focus for me. Centralization serves only those at the top, but decision-making is more efficient. It allows for maximum control, which is needed to implement, monitor, and enforce policy and regulation. Decentralization better serves an entire network of participants, but consensus slows progress. It mitigates risk by spreading out responsibility, creating transparency and instilling trust. Implemented exclusively, neither are completely reliable.

Decentralization will have the greatest positive societal impact in finance. Yet, full decentralization without any centralized components likely won’t work. The financial system we have today is based almost exclusively on centralization, and it continues to prove to be an unsuccessful strategy. Pressure builds when power grows in a silo and such pressure results in massive and uncontrollable risk.

Careful, you might break it

The New York Times recently published an article that highlights how vulnerable financial systems are locally and globally. The article features the story of a lone trader based in Norway who single-handedly shook the local financial system with the crisis, nearly inflicting damage upon the global system. How is it possible that one person could have an impact of that magnitude?

After the financial crisis of 2008–09, global financial regulatory authorities moved to better control the opaque derivatives market by processing previously over-the-counter trades through a central counterparty (CCP). In doing this, authorities established CCPs as ill-equipped enforcers of security. They were treated as safeguards for the system, but not enough checks or balances were, or have been, put in place to warrant such responsibility.

The CCP featured in the article, Nasdaq Clearing, had allowed the trader to take on unprecedented risk with large positions in energy futures. Underscoring the consequences of excessive leverage, the article explains that the “short, intense crisis [the trader] created was a precarious moment for the financial industry. It cast doubt on the safety of institutions like Nasdaq Clearing, which were supposed to prevent another meltdown.”

The centralized authority of CCP was never designed to ensure market stability. We are overly dependent on a system without a proper distribution of responsibility. This solution gives trust to an unqualified authority in order to manage system vulnerabilities, but at too great a cost.

The article quotes financial infrastructure writer Peter Norman, pointing out that “by staking so much trust on central counterparties, ‘authorities have stepped into the unknown. These are disasters waiting to happen.”’

Flying blind

The centralization of authority and practice across the financial system has led to an unwieldy level of complexity. As a result, massive markets have functioned in opacity, lacking regulatory oversight of risky market instruments — a driver of the 2008–09 financial crisis. It’s commonly said that hindsight is 20–20, but looking back it’s not clear that controlling authorities would have acted differently because, in the centralized system, they weren’t required to.

Complexity at this magnitude creates unknown risk. Left unchecked, risk increases creating new vulnerabilities, and a lack of transparency exacerbates the problem. When there is a faltering within the financial system, the impact comes in waves, impacting each level of the economy and even influencing fiscal and monetary policy. Deep complexity, the kind that can’t be easily undone, creates a dangerous knock-on effect that becomes too big to fail. At that point, the web can be too vast to effectively regulate.

How decentralization can help

Looking at the example presented by the Times, the financial system would be well served by a decentralized approach to monitoring and assessing systemic risk. Self-regulation, the kind of oversight performed within an organization or by various organizations within an industry doesn’t require participation by formal regulators. Formal regulation often isn’t as effective as self-regulation because it’s reactive, not proactive. A decentralized strategy includes the implementation of security policies and procedures that involve multiple parties, each with the responsibility to review risk status and ensure adherence to policies.

If a wider net of responsibility had been cast within the clearing and settlement sector, Nasdaq Clearing wouldn’t have been so dangerously burdened. Likewise, if responsibility for sustainable behavior was better shared across the financial industry, we’d have less concern over when and how systemic risk may affect us again.

With a focus on the improvements blockchain technology supports, I’m a communication strategist passionate about decentralized power structures. I’ve been writing about cryptography and distributed ledgers since 2016, identifying the many benefits of autonomous data security across industries. This passion for public privacy supports the mission of Keep, a project I’m very excited to be working with. You can find me on Twitter, or reach out to me on Slack.

Learn More

For more information about the Keep Network:

• Join us on Reddit.
• Check out our whitepaper.
• Read our business primer.
• Subscribe for email updates.
• Follow us on Twitter.
• Join our Slack.
• Join our Telegram.

The Failings of Financial Centralization was originally published in Keep Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re pleased to share that we’ve released new and updated API documentation on our website. The new API documentation has been developed very closely with our code and business logic, and corresponds even more closely to the implementation. This will help improve the experience to provide our clients with easily-integrated security for digital currencies on their platforms.

Explained at greater length on our engineering blog, the BitGo engineering team has been slowly transitioning away from our old API documentation, written in Markdown and processed with Slate, and migrating to new docs that are based on an OPENAPI 3.0 schema.

First to market with a robust API for business

First released in 2015, BitGo’s API has allowed clients to quickly and easily integrate multi-signature security, policies, and controls in their platform. Recently, the addition of support for cold storage, predictive UTXO management, and webhooks has allowed for more secure, advanced, and customizable development.

BitGo has been on an aggressive pace of supporting new assets, reaching a milestone of 100+ coins and tokens. BitGo’s API makes it easy to keep up with the pace of development since our unified API is compatible with these new assets without requiring any workflow changes on the implementor’s side.

An API for institutional investor engagement

BitGo is one of the only regulated custodians with API support for performing transactions. This is one of the reasons we have been chosen by over hundreds of exchanges, OTC desks, hedge funds, and payment processors.

Over 90% of BitGo transactions are created via the APIs, resulting in 125,000,000 calls per month in our production system and 300,000,000 calls in test.

To see how BitGo’s platform can serve your business, check out our new documentation. Have a question? Please get in touch at sales@bitgo.com.

February 28th 2019 Update

1:15pm PT — Sending and receiving are back online. It’s now safe to transact.

11:45am PT — Constantinople is live. We’re closely watching the fork to ensure things go as expected before we turn sends and receives back on.

11:30am PT — Sends and receives have been stopped. We’ve turned off ETH for clients at the UI level and API level.

10:30am PT — Expected timing for the hard fork remains at 7:45pm UTC / 11:45am PT. As previously noted, BitGo will be turning sends and receives off for 30 minutes before and after the hard fork. Clients will not be able to send funds, however, even though we are not supporting receives with notifications before, during, and after the hard fork, client wallets are still able to receive funds during this time.

9:30am PT — We anticipate that the Ethereum blockchain hard fork will take place later than expected at about 7:45pm UTC / 11:45am PT. We will update you hourly until the fork takes place here on the BitGo blog. Also follow us on Twitter for real time updates.

On Thursday, February 28th, the Ethereum blockchain will undergo a hard fork to implement software upgrades. The fork is expected to take place at block 7,280,000 — approximately 7:20pm UTC on February 28th, based on current estimates.

Ethereum was meant to hard fork on January 16th, however, on January 15th potential security vulnerabilities were discovered in the code and the hard fork was postponed.

What BitGo Clients Need to Know

Deposits and withdrawals will be suspended for ETH and ERC20 tokens during the hard fork. Before and after the fork, clients should expect 30 minutes of downtime to ensure transactions are being conducted safely.

Constantinople: Upgrading the Ethereum Blockchain

Constantinople is comprised of five Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs) focused on improving the efficiency and lessening the costs associated with producing Ethereum transactions. CTO Ben Chan detailed those EIPs in a January blog post.

Since the postponement there has been a change to Constantinople: having been found to be faulty, EIP 1283 has been removed from the upgrade. However, Ethereum developers have confirmed that the EIP will be reworked and included in an upcoming hard fork. Once employed, EIP 1283 will reduce gas costs for the contract storage opcode and enable new usage for contract storage.

If you have any questions regarding the hard fork, please contact us at support@bitgo.com.

BitGo will be adding Bitcoin SV to our platform. This new coin was created in the November 15th Bitcoin Cash hard fork. In the interest of providing access to funds, clients will be able to transfer Bitcoin SV from their BitGo multi-signature wallet.

BCH hard forks twice a year to facilitate software upgrades, but this hard fork was different; the community could not come to a consensus on the direction of BCH. With the November 15th fork, BitGo supported the dominant chain, Bitcoin Cash, and shared real time updates with clients. From the time of the fork until now, Bitcoin SV was secure in BitGo wallets, but wasn’t available to clients through the BitGo platform.

BitGo evaluates hard fork events based on a range of criteria including technical stability, market capitalization, liquidity, cost, and timing. At this time, preserving value for our customers is our predominant concern. However, we have reservations about Bitcoin SV regarding our objective internal coin support criteria. As such, BitGo plans to facilitate access to BSV funds for at least three months. We will reevaluate as the situation evolves and publish updates as they become available.

Please contact support@bitgo.com for any questions regarding recovery of BSV funds. We would love to hear from our partners and clients regarding coin support.

Easy access to fiat is essential for buying and selling digital currencies because it allows traders to take advantage of market opportunities. Combining fiat with storage of crypto puts control back in the hands of traders; no more waiting for wire transfers to complete or needing to move your Bitcoin between a cold storage and trading account.

BitGo Trust clients can now deposit fiat currency. Holding fiat allows institutional clients to buy and sell digital currencies directly from their BitGo Trust account.

We introduced custody for fiat with the launch of BitGo’s seamless trading integration platform where clients can access deep liquidity via our network of trading partners. Last week, we announced that Genesis Global Trading is our first partner, and there are many more to come.

For liquidity providers who are not regulated to hold fiat or digital currencies, easy access to fiat reduces trade settlement time. Without a fiat account, traders must transfer money each and every time they want to execute a buy order. This process is both time consuming and cumbersome, relying on external parties for wire transfers as well as the transfer of assets between accounts. More importantly, a delay in getting coins to market can cause market risk in price fluctuations.

All cash deposits (USD only) are done through a wire transfer. Once the wire is received and validated, the cash balance is updated in the USD wallet in the BitGo application. Clients enter their bank wiring info directly in the BitGo app (or API) for Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and AML purposes, enabling BitGo Trust to validate the wire when received.

We look forward to announcing additional trading partners soon. Read more about BitGo’s trading integration platform in this Bloomberg article.

Connect with a member of our team to learn more about BitGo Custody.

Today, BitGo announced a partnership with Genesis Global Trading that allows clients to buy and sell digital assets directly from the security of their BitGo Trust cold storage account. Partnering with Genesis underscores our commitment to developing institutional-grade cryptocurrency infrastructure and represents the first of many trading integration partnerships.

Seamless trading integration

BitGo has developed a seamless integration to easily connect trading platforms with our industry-leading cold storage custody solution. Through this platform, Genesis, an industry pioneer and leader in over-the-counter (OTC) digital currency trading, provides BitGo Trust clients with a deep liquidity network and access to competitive pricing and same day settlement.

This means that removing funds from cold storage is no longer a concern because clients don’t have to leave the BitGo platform, they can trade securely and safely from their BitGo accounts without having to manage keys.

Liquidity, security, and compliance

Our partnership with Genesis, a FINRA and SEC regulated company, characterizes a new institutional approach to custody where liquidity, security, and compliance are not compromised. BitGo’s seamless integration platform is a one-of-a-kind, full-scale solution that delivers critical infrastructure to investors and large volume traders, complete with a smooth user interface that makes it easy to buy and sell digital currencies. There will be no additional fees for this service.

Putting security first

Security is, and always will be, our priority concern. This integration puts security of your assets at the forefront, removing risk and complexity. Other custodians may choose to sacrifice security and safety by enabling fast withdrawals from cold storage, but this strategy places priority solely on speed, which is the antithesis of security. Focusing on withdrawal time instead of the necessary procedures and policies makes their clients susceptible to hacking, false instructions, and theft.

Allowing clients to trade directly from their BitGo Trust accounts solves the real problem, which is the need to access liquidity, not the need to speed up withdrawals.

Cryptocurrencies available through Genesis include Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic, (ETC), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), and Zcash (ZEC).

Learn more about BitGo’s security solutions by contacting sales@bitgo.com.

Today we’re pleased to announce support for Stellar, making BitGo the first multi-signature wallet and custodial solution on the market supporting the digital currency. Lumens (XLM) are the native asset of the Stellar network, a fully open-source distributed ledger.

In mid-November CoinDesk covered our news that BitGo multi-signature wallets and custody solutions support over 100 coins and tokens. With the addition of lumens, we now support 115 digital currencies. View our complete list of all supported coins and tokens.

BitGo’s wallet and custody solutions are 100% multi-signature, offering the best security for institutional investors who wish to invest in a basket of cryptocurrencies to mitigate risk. BitGo supports:

• 9 blockchains, including the top 5 coins by market cap
• 5 stablecoins
• 101 ERC20 tokens

BitGo CEO Mike Belshe highlighted the value that the Stellar network brings to clients with its unique payments system in an October interview on Fortune’s Balancing the Ledger. Specifically, the Stellar network’s infrastructure facilitates cross-asset transfers of value, including cross-border payments, and provides an instant clear, settlement, and execution platform.

“We’re continuously adding support for digital currencies that our clients express interest in, and lumens are a natural next addition. The Stellar network offers BitGo clients access to a public financial structure for cross-border transfers, making XLM an important new asset for investors,” said Ben Chan, BitGo Chief Technology Officer.

Until now, users of the Stellar network employed a manual process for creating a multi-signature wallet to hold their lumens. BitGo makes cryptocurrency security easier, providing a safe and secure multi-signature wallet and custody solution for XLM.

Along with XLM, BitGo supports Stellar’s federated address syntax, an email-like payment address that makes it far simpler for users to share payment details.

Jed McCaleb, cofounder of the Stellar Development Foundation explained that “as the leading institutional custodian service and business wallet in the market, BitGo provides a broad range of options for anyone interested in holding lumens. BitGo broadens institutional client exposure to Stellar by making it significantly easier and more secure to hold XLM.”

Only BitGo offers security, compliance, and custody solutions utilizing multi-signature wallets across all supported digital currencies. With Stellar’s focus on safe, reliable, and cost-effective money transfers, BitGo provides the right foundation for even greater adoption.

Learn more about Stellar and BitGo’s institutional custody solutions.

An earlier blog post provides details on the hard fork itself. Here, we’ll provide you with real-time updates:

• 1:14pm PST — BCH sending is live. All transactions created after this moment from BitGo BCH wallets will be replay protected to only be valid on BCHABC. Note that you have to update to the latest SDK to be able to send transactions.
• 12:25pm PT — We are in the final testing stage for BCH sends. BitGoJS version 4.40.2 or greater will be required for sending once we are back online. Only transactions built after we have brought BCH online will be replay protected and only valid on BCHABC. DO NOT send any transactions that were created before we brought BCH back online.
• November 20th, 10:45am PT — Receiving has been turned on for BCH. We’re in the process of catching up to the chain tip and notifying customers about received transactions since the hard fork.
• November 19th, 12:30pm PT — At 48 blocks ahead, ABC chain is leading in blocks, hash rate, total chain difficulty, community, and enterprise support. There have been about 600 blocks mined since the fork, and ABC has implemented wipeout protection for their chain. The post-fork situation appears to be sufficiently stable at this time, allowing BitGo to bring coin support online for Bitcoin Cash following the consensus rules of the Bitcoin ABC roadmap under the ticker BCH.

When BCH ABC comes back online, customers will receive BCH webhook notifications for the deposits of BCH ABC from the past 72 hours. BitGo recommends that you do not credit customers with SV at this time. When sending BCH from BitGo wallets on the ABC chain, we will construct transactions in such a manner that replay attacks will be prevented.

Please be aware of the following:

Tomorrow (11/20/2018), at 10:00am PT, customers will start receiving deposits. Two hours following that, at 12:00pm PT, they will be able to send. All BCH in their wallets will be BCH ABC.

Please exercise extreme caution when accepting any deposits of significant value. We recommend waiting 24+ confirmations before accepting any deposits. Attacks on the ABC chain have been threatened, and we cannot guarantee deposits will not be removed in such a scenario.

Please contact support@bitgo.com with any questions or concerns.

• November 17th, 4:30pm PT — We are continuing to monitor the fork. Currently, Bitcoin Cash ABC and SV chains are within 10 blocks, with no clear winner. Both sides of the fork remain vulnerable to 51% attacks, which have been threatened. At this time, the mining situation is not stable enough to allow BitGo a safe activation. The next update will be within 24 hours. Should you want to activate, please get in touch with us at support@bitgo.com.
• 4:45pm PT — We have been monitoring the chain split and have reassessed the risk of resuming service. At this time it is still unclear which chain will retain more of the hash power in the long term. Therefore, in the interest of customer safety, we will not be resuming service of BCH. We will continue to monitor the chain over the weekend, and provide you with daily updates here. We will reassess the safety of resuming service early next week. If you would like to be enabled on the ABC chain, please contact support@bitgo.com.
• 11:15am PT — BitGo is only supporting BCH ABC. Any BCH transactions (send and receive) that happen on our platform will occur on the ABC chain.
• November 16th, 10:05am PT — Network update: According to coin.dance: ABC is many blocks, ~25, ahead of SV. SV has been steadily catching up in terms of hash rate over the past few hours, and the two hash rates are starting to converge (though ABC is still ahead). Our team is continuing to monitor the progress.
• 4:31pm PT — The engineering team has made progress preparing our platform for replay-safe transactions on the ABC chain. We have been able to successfully achieve the creation and sending of transactions on the ABC chain whilst preserving SV funds.

However, at this time it is not certain which chain will officially be recognized as “BCH.” There is a chance that deposits credited on “BCH” (currently ABC) within our platform will be reverted if the SV chain were to become dominant.

For the sake of customer safety, we are going to continue to watch both chains for another 12–24 hours. After this period, we will reassess the risks of resuming service for the coin on our platform. Please be informed that at that time, any transactions made (both sent and received) will be on the ABC chain, and we are unfortunately unable to guarantee which will come out ahead. Until a dominant chain emerges, the safest approach may be to pause sends and receiving on BCH.

As a customer, if you do want to transact (on the ABC chain), please contact support@bitgo.com.

• 12:02pm PT — The network is in an interesting state right now. According to cash.coin.dance, it’s been ~43 minutes since a new ABC block has been mined, and ~18 minutes since a new SV block has been mined. Internally, BitGo’s engineering team is continuing to work through the tainted coins, but we are in a holding pattern for a few hours until many more blocks have been mined on ABC.
• 10:15am PT — So far, two blocks have been mined on ABC chain, none on SV chain.
• 10:04am PT — The BCH hard fork has taken place.
• 9:45am PT — SDK users will need to upgrade the SDK to make BCH sends, once sends are re-enabled.
• 9:25am PT — The hard fork will take place in four blocks’ time.
• 9:21am PT — We’ve turned off the indexer. Users will no longer see new blocks come in, new transactions, new webhook notifications, or balance updates.
• 8:25am PT — We’ve shut down sends on BCH to avoid long chain reorganizations and customer’s funds being confirmed and then unconfirmed.