The fork of Bitcoin Cash sparked a wave of airdrops and bitcoin-related fork projects in 2017. A new project, World Bitcoin (WBTC), is to fork at block 503,888 on or around January 12. Unlike other hard forks introducing new features to overcome Bitcoin’s limitations, WBTC will focus on building a ”global application infrastructure”, according to its website.
Also Read: Markets Update: Cryptos Look for Relief After South Korea FUD Causes Losses
Fork at Block 503,888
The total amount of WBTC is 2.121 billion, among which 21 million WBTC will be managed by the WBTC Foundation for the purpose of marketing and building a global ecosystem and developing new features. After the fork, Bitcoin users can get WBTC an the ratio of 1 BTC =100 WBTC.
New Year, New Forks: World Bitcoin and Bitcoin Candy are Expected SoonThe team claimed that the President of Xunlei Ltd. (NASDAQ:XNET), Sean Zou, is one of their advisors, but Xunlei released an official announcement this Monday denying that Sean Zou is a member of the WBTC team. Xunlei added that investors should do their homework instead of blindly buying “rumors”.
The project has by far made their code available on Github, but wallet services are not launched yet.
Candy Only for Bitcoin Cash Holders
Another big block project called Bitcoin Candy (CDY) will fork Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at block 512,666. BCH holders can get CDY at the ratio of 1 BCH 1000 CDY.
The project aims to make bitcoin resistant towards a perceived growing threat of quantum computing. Although experts assert Bitcoin is already quantum-computing resistant, the team explained that:
As top technology companies like D-Wave, IBM and Intel are ramping up their investment in quantum computing research and development, the age of quantum computing will probably arrive in five to ten years. As such, ECDSA-based cryptocurrencies will become breakable by quantum computers. The CDY team will focus on experimenting with post-quantum signatures to secure cryptocurrencies.
According to its website, CDY will scale its block size to 8 megabytes featuring the Equihash algorithm and difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA). And the CDY protocol will produce a new block, on average, every two minutes.
CDY’s supply available for mining is 21 billion units, among which 210 million are pre-mined to motivate early developers and for promotion. Only BCH users can get CDY at the ratio of 1BCH=1000 CDY. The project explained that they believe BCH has a better future as it better represents “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.”
Wallet service Bitpie has promised that they will support all forked coins to ensure a ”freer” market. Coinex has announced they will list the forked coin and give whoever owns bitcon cash the corresponding CDY at the time of the split (around or after January 13).
Basically, everyone can have a forked coin. Fork mania is bound to continue in 2018. Some bitcoin-related projects will try to add new features while many others will simply be scams.
What do you think of WBTC and CDY? Are you going to fork a coin yourself? Leave your comments below.