This weekend a small wave of hard forks produced World Bitcoin (WBTC) from the Bitcoin legacy chain and a second fork, Bitcoin Candy (CDY) was mined from Bitcoin Cash.
As a handful of developers have begun to realize the difficulty in building truly original crypto products, it is becoming increasingly popular to hard fork a more well-known coin or token. While Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is perhaps the most popular, there have been two forks in the past week. The technique earned so much attention that a project called Forkgen emerged which allows users to fork their own coin.
While some claim to be improving upon the original chain, the primary benefit for many comes from the simple fact that holders of the legacy coin are airdropped a ratio from the bifurcation.
In the case of CDY, holders of BCH will receive 1,000 CDY for every BCH they hold. WBTC, on the other hand, will airdrop 100 tokens for every BTC. It should also be noted, that Coinex is the only exchange currently trading CDY and thus if your tokens are not held in a BCH wallet, you may not be eligible to claim the hard fork.
At current, there are no exchanges trading WBTC, but anyone who holds a BTC wallet will be awarded the newly forked assets.
According to the team behind CDY, their primary concern is the “dark cloud” of quantum computing on the horizon. Thus they hope “to explore anti-quantum attacks solution of bitcoin based on [their] cryptography background.”
They will also be expanding the total supply of CDY to 21 billion and using an equihash (GPU) PoW algorithm. Further, one percent of the 21 billion supply has already been pre-mined.
WBTC’s objectives are slightly more vague, however. The eight page sliding website has managed to capture key buzzwords while providing little information outside of the following mission statement: “Through technological innovation, build a global blockchain application infrastructure.” WBTC, does however offer a wallet service and access to their source code on GitHub.
Both coins are available at current as CDY was mined at block 512666 and WBTC was mined at 503888. That being said, both forks should be investigated. Even at a quick glance, it should be clear the long-term value that they propose. Thus, as with all things crypto, claim your airdrops and do your own research.
