Free Money? Traders In Asia Are Buying Bitcoin Cash Ahead of Hard Fork

With bitcoin cash now looking certain to split into two competing cryptocurrencies, some traders in Asia are betting that the sum of the parts will be worth more than the whole.

Stepping back, bitcoin cash has been doing a hard fork roughly every six months since it split off from the original bitcoin network in August 2017.

One camp has rallied behind the more-established version of the bitcoin cash software, known as bitcoin ABC, and keeping the network's current block size at 32 megabytes.

The other, led by Craig Wright - one of the most polarizing figures in crypto, famous for claiming he is bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto - is pushing for an alternative called bitcoin SV and an increase in the block size to 128 MB. Last week, crypto exchanges with the largest trading volume for BCH including Binance, Huobi, OKEx and Bitfinex, all announced they will support the fork, bringing potential liquidity in the secondary market for the forked-off assets, should the split occur.

"We can see that traders are excited for the fork. Of course, everyone will try to capitalize on the creation of new coins. But at the same time, the huge increase in trading volume also indicates their confidence in the market, especially for institutional traders." said Andy Cheung, head of operations at OKEx.

While Huobi and Binance declined to share specific data, a Huobi representative said: "If it's about getting free candies, the expectations for institutions and retail traders are pretty aligned. So their overall trading trend is also similar."

To be sure, not every buyer is necessarily set on holding bitcoin cash until after the fork.

This wouldn't be the first time traders made a bet on a hard fork.

There was a similar buying trend in 2017 ahead of the one that led to bitcoin cash seceding from bitcoin.

The BCH buying is "a risk-on type of trade," he said.