P2P marketplace Bitsquare has confirmed support of a user-activated soft fork (UASF) and signalled its opposition to Bitmain.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Bitsquare reiterated its desire for SegWit activation while condemning Bitmain’s user-activated hard fork (UAHF) proposal. “This announcement of Bitmain is great news for Bitcoin, as it removes a lot of uncertainty and gives a lot of support for the UASF side,” founder Manfred Karrer said.
Karrer announced that as part of the process of supporting UASF, Bitsquare would “halt trading” until the issue of a hard fork was resolved. “We can expect that Bitmain will use its hash power to attack the UASF chain if they feel the need for that. This might lead to all kind of unpleasant situations like long confirmation times, an unclear amount of confirmations to be considered safe, very volatile tx fees and more,” stated Karrer. He continued, “For an exchange that means undefined and uncontrollable risks … there would likely be a huge effort for support and arbitration which would kick us back with our road map. For all those reasons, we need to halt trading on Bitsquare.”
In what he labelled as an ‘exit strategy’ for users, Karrer added that support for alternative base currencies for Bitsquare - Dogecoin and Litecoin, perhaps with Dash and others to follow - would appear ‘with the next release’ of the project.
Despite the problems facing the community due to the escalating debate, Bitsquare nonetheless saw new weekly trading highs in several markets, according to data from Coin Dance.