Forks and airdrops policy

Recently, the emergence of "forks" and "airdrops" has created a new method for delivering perceived and real value to owners of existing digital currencies. The rapid development of new forks and airdrops has raised questions about whether Bit2Me customers can expect to receive this value. Every fork or airdrop faces technical, security, liquidity, and timing challenges. This document describes the issue and clarifies Bit2Me's policy on how it will handle forks.

Objectives

Security: Bit2Me's primary objective is always security. Bit2Me will never introduce support for any fork that Bit2Me believes could be unsafe to do so. As forks have emerged over the last year, many have been launched quickly, with technical implementations that change rapidly right up until the launch of the new fork.

Value Preservation: Bit2Me also aims to preserve value for customers. When forks with significant value occur, Bit2Me will work with customers to try and deliver that new value to them. It should be noted that Bit2Me may or may not support the coin in a wallet with all available functionalities while maintaining the security principles Bit2Me generally strives to uphold. Bit2Me will provide customers with tools so they can access the coin and convert it into other forms of value.

Airdrops vs Forks

Definitions

• Airdrop: An airdrop is when a digital currency blockchain issues an additional amount of the new asset using known public keys or addresses from another blockchain, so that private key holders of the original blockchain can access the value on the "airdropped" blockchain.
• Fork: A fork is a new form of digital currency that arises when a group of people decides to apply a new consensus layer to an existing blockchain. The result is the creation of a new blockchain, which can be very similar to or very different from the original blockchain.

For the purposes of this document, Bit2Me treats Airdrops and Forks similarly. Bit2Me customers generally wish to have access to all value they can access, and whether the new value is delivered via an Airdrop or a Fork, Bit2Me's evaluation and support for that new value will be determined by the policy described in this document.

Policy Considerations

There are 5 criteria taken into account in Bit2Me's decision to handle a fork: technical stability, market capitalization, liquidity, cost, and time. 

Technical Stability: Because security is our most important objective, the technical evaluation of any new fork or airdrop is critical. Bit2Me will support a fork if it considers the new fork to be technically stable and secure. This will be determined based on several factors, including:

• The technical team creating the fork
• Whether the fork provides replay protection from the original fork
• Whether the fork provides wipeout protection from the original fork
• The strength of the new fork, its validation and mining capacity.

Market Capitalization: Bit2Me will support a new fork or airdrop if the value within the fork or airdrop is significant. If it does not rank among the top 10 exchanges globally with a value of over $100 million, Bit2Me will likely not support it. It should be noted that in many cases, a new fork or airdrop may appear to have sufficient market capitalization but may not have enough liquidity (see below).

Liquidity: In addition to having adequate market value, the forked coin must have sufficient liquidity. A Bitcoin fork, for example, even valued at $10 per coin, would have a market capitalization exceeding $160 million. However, if it is lightly traded, access to the coin's value would be an illusion for Bit2Me customers. For Bit2Me to support the coin, there must be sufficient liquidity in the market on reputable exchanges for a sustained period.
For Bit2Me to consider a forked coin to have real value, it must have daily liquidity of at least $25 million on recognized and reliable exchanges for a period of 14 days.

Cost: Supporting new coins involves significant costs. Bit2Me's issuance of wallets for a currency fundamentally supports both the coin and its blockchain forever. Ostensibly, some forks are straightforward for Bit2Me to support. For example, if a forked coin is technologically the same as the original, it can be relatively inexpensive to add the new coin.

At the same time, some forks or airdrops can be technologically very different from pre-existing supported coins. For example, new coins or airdrops might be based on different cryptographic algorithms (RSA instead of Elliptic Curve), they might have new transaction formats, block formats, multisignature features, or other changes. The greater the changes, the higher the cost of support and maintenance.

If a new fork is costly but holds sufficient value for Bit2Me customers, the company will do its utmost to allow users access to the new coin. It should be noted that this may affect the timelines within which Bit2Me can do so.

Time: New airdrops and forks are usually introduced with some notification before the airdrop or fork occurs. Sometimes the notification periods are very short, less than 8 weeks. There are also airdrops conducted in such a way that they will later "expire," giving implementers very little time to claim them before the value is lost.

Much to our regret, Bit2Me cannot guarantee support for new forks or airdrops within a short timeframe. Business obligations, developer availability, and cost are material factors, and security, testing, quality, and service are our main objectives. While Bit2Me will do its utmost to make value available to its customers, the company cannot guarantee a specific timeframe when the exact considerations for future forks can be so varied.

Finally, if Bit2Me decides not to support a fork at a given time, it does not mean that Bit2Me will never support that fork. For example, at the time of launch, a fork may not meet the stability market capitalization or liquidity thresholds for Bit2Me to support it. In the future, if the fork becomes viable, Bit2Me may, at its discretion, support the fork or airdrop.

Principles: In the event of an upcoming modification to the Bitcoin Network or another applicable network that could potentially result in a Digital Asset Network Fork or Airdrop, Bit2Me will make every reasonable effort to provide the value of the forked Digital Asset to the customer. However, Bit2Me's primary concern is always the security of its existing Digital Assets. Bit2Me, at its sole discretion, may choose to make Digital Assets available to the customer or not. Furthermore, implementing or providing access to any Digital Asset created as a result of a Fork may take a considerable amount of time for Bit2Me. The Customer shall indemnify Bit2Me for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss due to the inability to access any Digital Asset created as a result of a Fork or Airdrop.

In the event that Bit2Me considers a fork to be technically secure with sufficient market value and liquidity, but the customer wishes to access the fork before Bit2Me can support it due to cost or time considerations, Bit2Me will in good faith determine a product plan that allows the customer to access the value of the fork or airdrop in a way that the user, under their own responsibility, can access the coin.

Bit2Me reserves the right to update this policy and the criteria for measuring the viability of a Fork or Airdrop occasionally based on new technological, legal, or environmental factors that may arise.