ShapeShift and the Ethereum Hardfork
July 19, 2016
TL;DR – All Ethereum-based assets will stop trading on ShapeShift just prior to the fork on Wednesday July 20th, reopening as soon as possible later in the day.
This Wednesday, July 20th, at around 1-2pm CET (8-9am ET), Ethereum will be hard-forking. Many Ethereum holders and miners are desiring the hard-fork to deal with the DAO exploit, both to prevent the attacker from obtaining tens of millions of dollars of DAO tokens and also to return the DAO tokens back as Ethereum to the investors. The hard fork has been controversial, but seems to be widely supported at this point.
When the hard fork occurs, there will exist two Ethereum blockchains for some period of time. Likely, within minutes or perhaps a couple hours, one chain will clearly pull ahead of the other in mining hash rate and block height. At that point, the community will coalesce around that winning chain as the “real” Ethereum.
Prior to this hardfork, ShapeShift will halt trading of all Ethereum-based assets (ETH, DAO, DGD, etc). Trading will be halted early Wednesday morning/late Tuesday night, depending on market conditions. If you plan to move in or out of these assets, please do so prior to Tuesday night CET.
Trading of the assets will resume at ShapeShift's discretion as soon as possible after the hard fork is resolved, likely late Wednesday afternoon, CET.
Note: If you bought or hold Ethereum-based assets prior to the fork, you do not need to do anything. Your assets will not be invalidated or disappear; they will persist onto whichever chain ends up winning after the hard fork.
We encourage everyone to join our Slack group for any questions and updates.
Kind regards,
Erik Voorhees
CEO ShapeShift.io