We’ve received a lot of inquiries about our stance on the Bitcoin Cash Fork (known as BCC) that is scheduled to activate on August 1st. At this time BitPay’s merchant and payouts services have no plans to use or support the Bitcoin Cash fork. All of BitPay’s activity will be conducted on the main Bitcoin chain as created by the hash rate (mining power) majority. This means that your customers will not be able to pay a BitPay invoice using BCC. All BitPay payouts and settlements will be on the main Bitcoin chain as usual.
For users of the BitPay and Copay wallet apps, we also have no immediate plans to support BCC. Since these apps are true bitcoin wallets, users hold the private keys and have full, exclusive access to their funds. While users will not be able to observe a BCC balance or create BCC transactions with our apps at this time, it is possible to access BCC at a later date with additional software.
If you have a BitPay or Copay wallet, it is essential that you retain your wallets (or your backup words) and not delete them, even if you empty the BTC balance out of your wallets. While BitPay does not have any plans to write software to support BCC at this time, it is possible for third parties to build tools to allow access to BCC balances from Copay or BitPay wallets.
If you are considering withdrawing funds from exchanges that do not support BCC, it is safe to withdraw to the BitPay or Copay wallets. While it will require tools to be developed, any BCC balances will be accessible to you as long as you have the private keys stored in the app. For large balances, we highly recommend the use of the multi-sig capabilities in the BitPay and Copay wallets.
