At midnight on Tuesday, August 1, the Bitcoin blockchain will split, giving rise to a new cryptocurrency that will go by the name of Bitcoin Cash (BCC / BCH). If you are a Bitcoin user from India and want to move to Bitcoin Cash, then be prepared to move your Bitcoins to a private wallet as most of the exchanges in the country have said they will not support BCC.

“We won’t be supporting Bitcoin Cash and I don’t see any exchanges in India supporting it. We will be suspending operations at the end of day today (Monday), because it is unclear what is going to happen. So, we will wait for another two-three days, and once everything settles, we will be back online,” Sathvik Vishwanath, CEO and cofounder of Bitcoin exchange Unocoin, told FactorDaily.

With BCC unable to get majority support from the ecosystem, most exchanges and miners have decided to side with the dominant chain, which will most likely be Bitcoin or BTC.

Bitcoin exchange Zebpay said in its blog post that it will not support BCC, and asked users to move their Bitcoins to their private wallets if they wished to use BCC. “Zebpay will NOT support Bitcoin Cash or its trading. If you want access to Bitcoin Cash, please remove your bitcoins from your Zebpay wallet to a wallet in which you control the private keys on or before 31st July,” the post read.

On the other hand, Bitcoin exchange Coinsecure has not yet confirmed whether it will support Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, but has said it too will go with the dominant chain, whichever that might be. The exchange has, however, asked users to move their Bitcoins to their private wallets if they wish to shift to BCC. “If you are interested in having access to Bitcoin Cash, you will need to remove Bitcoin from your Coinsecure wallet to an external wallet by July 31st at 9pm IST,” Coinsecure said in a post.

Also, with August 1 being the scheduled activation date of BIP 148, all the above-mentioned exchanges have said that they will halt transactions on their platforms before midnight on July 31.

BIP 148 is an improvement proposal to the Bitcoin system that will implement a feature called SegWit, which many hope will improve scalability of the Bitcoin network. SegWit is short for Segregated Witness, which is the process by which blocks on a blockchain are made smaller by removing signature data from Bitcoin transactions, so a higher number of transactions can be done in the same amount of space.

What is Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork (split) from the main Bitcoin blockchain, which has the support of some miners, developers and users who were against the BIP 91 implementation. The split is set to take place on August 1, 2017, at 5:50pm IST. At the time of publishing this story, BCC was valued at about $333.

According to the Bitcoin Cash website, BCC will come with an increase in the block size limit to 8MB. It will also support a new transaction type with additional features such as ‘input value signing’, for improved hardware wallet security, and elimination of the quadratic hashing problem.

If you move your BTC to a private wallet and later plan to move to the BCC blockchain, the number of BCC you will have will be equal to the BTC previously in your wallet, thereby ensuring your wallet balance remains the same. This is provided the wallet and the exchange you use both support BCC.

A software implementation of Bitcoin Cash protocol called Bitcoin ABC (adjustable blocksize cap) was launched by Amaury Sechét at the Future of Bitcoin conference in the Netherlands on June 30-July 1. It is a is a full-node implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, which has removed the SegWit code, and has added supported for adjustable blocksize cap.

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