China: Trader Sues Exchange OKCoin for Failing to Release Bitcoin Cash

A Chinese Bitcoin (BTC) investor has sued local crypto exchange OKCoin for allegedly preventing him from getting Bitcoin Cash (BCH) after the BTC fork, local news agency Legal Weekly reports July 31. The case is reportedly the first legal action in China that involved last year’s fork of Bitcoin.

The investor, known under the pseudonym Feng Bin, filed a lawsuit against OKCoin, accusing the exchange of blocking him from receiving 38.748 BCH that he was due after Bitcoin’s hard fork in August 2017.

In the lawsuit, Feng Bin states that he attempted to sell the Bitcoin Cash when the digital currency reached its all-time high of around $4,000 in December, 2017. However, when the investor tried to withdraw the BCH after the fork, he reportedly “found that there was no ‘button’ to extract the [BCH] that the platform promised.”

Following a complaint to the platform’s customer support, OKCoin stated that Feng Bin could not extract any Bitcoin Cash because the platform’s program for claiming the forked crypto has expired. The investor in turn claimed that the crypto exchange had not made an official announcement about the deadline for claiming Bitcoin Cash:

“I have been paying attention to the announcement of the OKcoin currency release. In all the announcements, there is no declaration of the deadline for receipt and the removal of the program.”

OKCoin has reportedly challenged Feng Bin’s claim, citing inconsistencies between his story and the records of his account balances.

Bitcoin Cash is one well-known example of a hard fork, which is a permanent split in a blockchain protocol, wherein nodes running in the previous version will no longer be accepted in the new version.

Bitcoin forked on August 1, 2017, leading to the presence of two completely different digital currencies, while users who held Bitcoin prior to the fork received an equal number of Bitcoin Cash. BCH celebrated its “first birthday” earlier last week.

Bitcoin Cash has been the subject of some controversy throughout the year. Roger Ver, one of the biggest promoters of BCH claimed that Bitcoin Cash is the “real Bitcoin” in November 2017. Ver said that BCH will “have the bigger market cap, trade volume and user base in the future.”