Kraken Exchange Joins Binance, ShapeShift in Delisting Bitcoin SV

Another major crypto exchange is delisting bitcoin SV amid an ongoing feud between that cryptocurrency's creator Craig Wright and outspoken members of the bitcoin community.

San Francisco-based Kraken announced Tuesday that it will no longer support BSV, citing both community sentiment and ongoing litigation filed against the exchange by the coin's advocates.

The move follows announcements Monday by two other prominent exchanges, Binance and ShapeShift, that they were delisting BSV in response to Wright's behavior.

Binance's CEO, Changpeng Zhao, tweeted that Wright is "Poisoning" the bitcoin community with his threats to sue people who called him a fraud because he has claimed to be bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

In December, during the contentious hard fork of bitcoin cash when it got split into bitcoin cash ABC and bitcoin cash "Satoshi Vision," Florida-based mining firm United Investment Corp. filed a federal lawsuit against a group of defendants for supporting the ABC version, including Kraken and its CEO Jesse Powell.

On Monday, Kraken launched a poll on its Twitter account, asking people to vote for or against delisting BSV. At the moment of writing, the poll shows that around 70,545 users voted, 71 percent supporting delisting, seven percent opposing and 21 percent not caring.

If the vast majority of the votes had been in favor of keeping BSV at Kraken, it wouldn't have been delisted, but if the results were indecisive, say 50/50, the coin would still have been delisted, Powell said.

In the past Kraken has delisted other tokens, including Namecoin and Iconomi - the former because of its low volume and the need to support a technically onerous upgrade at some point, the latter because the protocol was changed by its creators.

The delisting wave started after Wright threatened to sue a pseudonymous Twitter user nicknamed Hodlonaut, known for starting the bitcoin Lightning Torch, and crypto investor and podcaster Peter McCormack, unless they publicly recognized Wright as bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Nakamoto.

"Given the impact that trading venues can have on the visibility and price of a coin, such a subjective delisting sets a precedent which has the potential to increase the space's vulnerability to manipulation. If a coin can be delisted due to some[one] not approving of a community/person's legal activities, what's to say that a similar narrative cannot be created in the future simply to support a malicious actor's monetary interest."