Only a handful of Bitcoin wallet platforms and exchanges are supporting Bitcoin Cash deposits and withdrawals. Bitcoin users who received Bitcoin Cash (BCH) after the Aug. 1 hard fork can utilize secure wallet platforms from Trezor, BTC.com and BitGo to safely store BCH.
The Aug. 1 hard fork execution of BCH had minimal impact on the Bitcoin network. Since then, Bitcoin has been on an upward trend, achieving new all-time highs amidst rising demand from institutional investors.
However, Bitcoin Cash has struggled to demonstrate consistent growth.
Many Bitcoin exchanges and wallet platforms have expressed their reluctance in supporting BCH due to technical difficulties and issues.
As Cointelegraph previously reported, even Trezor, which released a beta BCH wallet immediately after the fork was completed, explained that the integration of BCH was significantly harder than the team expected.
In an official blog post, Trezor revealed some of the difficulties its development team faced:
“On the day of the fork, however, we started noticing odd things happening. During the maintenance of the BCH Bitcore server, we witnessed how the server started losing addresses and transactions. Addresses had negative balances, which should not be technically possible. This caused the initial delay in deployment, as we could not release a Wallet that would use corrupted data.”
So, which Bitcoin wallet platforms support BCH?
As of current, BTC.com, BitGo and Trezor are supporting BCH deposits and withdrawals. Users that have been credited with Bitcoin Cash upon the execution of its hard fork can safely store BCH on the three wallets.
BitGo has integrated a user-friendly interface into its main cryptocurrency wallet platform due to overwhelming demand from BCH holders. Because many wallet platforms and exchanges like Coinbase refused to provide support for BCH, Bitcoin users that were credited with BCH requested prominent wallet platforms including BitGo to integrate support.
“Due to strong customer interest, BitGo will enable full support of Bitcoin Cash. You’ll soon find a new coin in the BitGo interface and be able to fully send and receive BCH from your BitGo wallet,” said the BitGo team.
BTC.com was one of the first wallet platforms in the industry to integrate full support for BCH users. Similar to BitGo, BTC.com developed a specific user-interface for BCH users. The BTC.com wallet
“As of Aug. 4, 2017, both current and new BTC.com users can send, receive and store Bitcoin Cash in the BTC.com Bitcoin Cash wallet. The BTC.com Bitcoin Cash wallet is currently available as a web wallet, and can be best accessed from desktop,” revealed BTC.com.
Why were wallet platforms hesitant in providing support for BCH?
The Trezor development team, the operating team behind the most secure Bitcoin hardware wallet, best explained in its blog post as to why many Bitcoin wallet platforms including Coinbase were hesitant toward providing full support toward BCH.
During the roll out of Trezor’s BCH beta wallet and the launch of the full BCH wallet, Trezor struggled with bugs that led to the disappearance of transactions on user wallets.
Although the bugs were fixed later on through extensive investigation and development, Trezor noted that such bugs would not have transpired if the team had enough time to test BCH and the integration process.
“It is the lack of time to test applications, to discover and fix mistakes. If more time was available, we would have caught this bug during testing,” said Trezor.