Bitcoin Forks Struggle for Exchange Listings: Security Concerns Come First
David Schwartz, former CTO at Ripple, weighed in on why major cryptocurrency exchanges are hesitant to list bitcoin-based assets. He cited security and potential design risks as key concerns.
The controversy began with an X user questioning why Coinbase, Kraken, and Trezor were ignoring Bitcoin BLAKE2b, a separate chain that split from bitcoin using the BLAKE2b mining algorithm instead of SHA-256.
Schwarz said exchanges may first review safeguards such as replay protection when handling newly split bitcoin-based assets to prevent transactions from being duplicated across different chains. This could lead to issues for exchanges in protecting funds, and Bitcoin BLAKE2b's structure, which shares transaction history with bitcoin before the split, was also cited as a potential issue.
Schwarz emphasized that exchanges need sufficient safeguards such as replay protection to ensure security, preventing transactions conducted on one chain after a fork from being reprocessed on another chain. The market response indicates that technical stability and operational burden for newly split chains are significant concerns, with existing fork assets being judged by different standards.