Bitcoin Cash [BCH] pre-fork trading announced on Bitfinex: Exchange takes a neutral stance in heated hash war

Bitfinex announced support for the Bitcoin Cash [BCH] hard fork around 2 days ago, and followed it up with a recent report that detailed how they would react to the upcoming chain split. The exchange platform has decided to adopt a solution that they call Chain Split Tokens or CSTs in order to “prevent any risk of manipulation”.

Citing the need to “maintain a healthy market” Bitfinex has decided to designate two CSTs known as BAB, for the ABC implementation with the backing of Bitmain, and BSV, for the Satoshi Vision implementation backed by Craig Wright and Coingeek. While doing so, the exchange also stated:

“While we want to make such forks available to our customers, our limited and temporary support for them is not and should not be construed as support for any particular project.”

Users of the platform can redeem these tokens by debiting their Bitcoin Cash balance, upon which they will receive an equivalent amount of BAB and BSV tokens. This process can be reversed by users at any time using the Token Manager utility on the platform.

Proceeding the fork and the snapshot event following it, the CSTs will be converted into on-chain coins, with trading continuing under the BAB and BSV ticker symbols respectively.

Bitfinex also stated that their BCH margin markets experienced a significant increase in short positions. They have now released trading for these tokens in 4 pairings, namely BAB/USD, BAB/BTC, BSV/USD and BSV/BTC. Margin and leveraged trading will not be available on these pairs. BCH markets will be frozen at UNIX time 1542300000, or around 4:40:00 PM UTC on November 15th, clarified Bitfinex. They went on to say:

“Once all negative balances have been settled, we may, at our sole and absolute discretion, delist BAB or BSV and make withdrawals only available for a limited time.”