Coinbase, the world’s largest bitcoin wallet service provider with 28.9 million wallets and 8.7 million active users, and GDAX, its flagship digital asset exchange, will not support Bitmain’s hard forked bitcoin.
In an official announcement, the Coinbase team stated:
Bitmain’s Hard Fork
On June 14, Bitmain, arguably the most influential bitcoin mining equipment manufacturer and the parent company of Antpool, the largest bitcoin mining pool in the market, released a blog post entitled “UAHF: A contingency plan against UASF (BIP148)” to clarify the company’s plan to execute a hard fork and create a separate bitcoin blockchain if the Digital Currency Group-led Segwti2x is not approved or activated. In a comment to CoinJournal, Bitmain explained their reasoning:
“The UAHF is a contingency plan to protect the Bitcoin ecosystem from the threats posed by the BIP148 fork aka UASF. This also means that it will be activated later than, and not at the same time as, the UASF fork. Reinforcing its role as a contingency plan to protect the Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitmain will dedicate some of its own hash rate to mining the UAHF chain for at least 72 hours and release it to the public only if the threat of the UASF chain to the Bitcoin ecosystem appears imminent.”
This week, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91, a kludge-like solution between the original Segregated Witness (Segwit) proposal and Segwit2x, officially reached its 80 percent activation threshold due to overwhelming hashrate support from major mining pools.
At the time, the vast majority of exchanges and wallet service providers within the bitcoin industry have expressed concerns regarding Bitmain’s threats to hard-fork the bitcoin blockchain and clarified that the newly created bitcoin blockchain, if created, will not be considered as bitcoin but as an alternative cryptocurrency or an altcoin.