Rootstock (RSK) CEO Diego Gutierrez has confirmed it will finally launch “between mid-November and mid-December” after the possible SegWit2x hard fork.

In a Twitter exchange Monday, Gutierrez said the timing of the initial release was deliberate to avoid complications from a hard fork occurring afterwards.

RSK is an open source smart contracts platform pegged to Bitcoin, the first such implementation for the network which will see significantly more capacity and faster payments.

When asked what stage the project’s technology was at, Gutierrez added the only reason for “waiting” was the SegWit2x hard fork issue.

“...On our side, all the tech is in place, and the reason why we're waiting is because of the potential fork which might happen after mid (November),” he wrote.

On the subject of which chain RSK would support if a hard fork did occur, Gutierrez said that any willing to integrate smart contracts, but that “limited resources” meant the chain with most transactions would get “priority.”

China setback

SegWit2x has taken a back seat in the Bitcoin industry debate this month as regulatory upheaval in China becomes a decisive factor regulating price and volatility.

Community consensus has recently drifted towards discrediting the forking proposal, which came out of Barry Silbert’s so-called New York Agreement (NYA) in May.

The advent of Bitcoin Cash, Blockstream CEO Adam Back said as an example, made SegWit2x seem “moot.”

Catallaxy co-founder Francis Pouliot yesterday meanwhile added to the opinion that such hard forks were ultimately malicious acts, echoing Chain engineer Oleg Andreev last month, who described them as “FUD projects.”