OKEx announces Bitcoin Cash futures contracts’ early delivery amidst hard fork

OKEx, a popular cryptocurrency exchange made a special announcement regarding the Bitcoin Cash [BCH] futures contracts with the onset of the hard fork. However, the announcement was made after the execution of the delivery of futures contracts. OKEx stated that the BCH futures contracts will stop trading for a while to be delivered later. The original Twitter post read:

“SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: All Bitcoin Cash (BCH) futures contracts will stop trading at 9:05am and be delivered at 10:00am Nov 14, 2018 CET (UTC +1) due to the upcoming hard fork. We will provide a detailed explanation shortly.”

The platform also released a post to clarify its reason for the early delivery of futures contracts. Here, OKEx wrote that the BCH market is extremely volatile due to the ongoing hard fork in the ecosystem. This may cause massive impacts, for instance, cascade liquidation, OKEx stated.

Secondly, the result of the hash-war and hard fork of the ecosystem is unpredictable, which makes the reaction of several exchanges to the event ambiguous. OKEx decided to take this step to buy time to respond to the BCH market amidst the hard fork and delivery data from the ecosystem.

Next, the question of “Why was the last traded price chosen as the delivery prices?” was answered by the exchange. It established two points to explain their stance on the matter. They stated:

“1. The underlying asset of OKEx BCH futures contracts (Bitcoin ABC) is not actually generated.

1. There is no Bitcoin ABC trading pair with enough market depth and trading volume to compose an index for delivery.”