Bitcoin Cash's Scheduled Hard Fork Tripped Up By Software Bug

A system-wide upgrade otherwise known as a hard fork appears to have split the bitcoin cash network in two.

Bitcoin Cash is the fourth largest cryptocurrency in the world and possesses a market capitalization of over $6 billion.

The chain split occurred after the bitcoin cash network tried to upgrade to new software at block number 582,679, according to data from BitMEX Research's Forkmonitor tool.

As noted by a user on Reddit, one version of the software by bitcoin cash developer group - Bitcoin ABC - carried a code bug affecting the bitcoin cash mempool that was unrelated to the upgrade itself.

Similar to the bitcoin blockchain, bitcoin cash requires miners to validate transactions and append new blocks.

Vin Armani - CTO of bitcoin cash application CoinText - reaffirmed to CoinDesk: "Blocks were going in empty for about an hour and a half. Now the mempool is clear and transactions are going into blocks normally. All is back to normal."

It is unclear at this time how many nodes - that is, computer servers running Bitcoin ABC software - have upgraded to the fixed software.

According to the R&D team of mining and pool operations for blockchain startup Navier, the majority of bitcoin cash miners use Bitcoin ABC software as opposed to other bitcoin cash software implementations such as Bitcoin Unlimited.

"The majority of bitcoin cash miners use the ABC client rather than the BU client, so people were creating transactions and submitting them to the mempool faster than they could be written to a block and most of those blocks were empty," explained David Steinberg, the vice president of Navier.

"The fact the introduction of this bug coincided with the hard fork exacerbated the issue, since you must upgrade your node to participate in the fork," explained Steinberg.