Leading cryptocurrency exchange BTCC earlier this week issued an official statement on how it would deal with the implementation of the different bitcoin scaling solutions currently being discussed.

BTCC said that it fully supports the New York Agreement (BTC1), adding that it is actively participating in the testing and implementation of BTC1.

“We are upgrading our exchanges’ and pool wallets to BTC1 (1.14.4), and expect to complete these upgrades by Friday, July 21st, 2017. Our pool is currently signaling support for BTC1, and we will continue doing so,” it said in a blog post.

It further clarified that in the case of any hard fork, its highest priority would be protecting customers’ funds, adding:

“In case of a hard fork, BTCC will give existing customers tokens on the minority chains based on how many tokens they have on the majority chain at the time of the hard fork. We will update users as the situation progresses.

“BTCC will always consider the longest valid chain (the version of bitcoin that has the most proof-of-work behind it) as bitcoin (BTC).”

BTCC Founder Bobby Lee on Thursday took to Twitter to announce that 100% of BTCC’s mining pool servers are now running BTC1:

BIP 91 Locks in

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 91 (BIP 91) has now locked in with over 90 percent of all hash power signaling their support. James Hilliard proposed BIP 91 as a way to implement SegWit quickly and safely, without the risk of a network split.

CoinDesk explained that the BIP 91 lock-in marks the first step for SegWit activation on the network. For its complete activation, following steps are required:

• A 336-block grace period, which would take about two and a half days. During this period, minors would have time to prepare for activation.
• BIP 91 activation would take place at block 477,120. In theory, mining pools will start rejecting blocks that do not signal support for SegWit (BIP 141).
• During the next difficulty period of 2016 blocks, SegWit could lock-in.

With this, bitcoin's SegWit upgrade will be official, and the upcoming user-activated soft fork (UASF) proposal, BIP 148, will be obsolete.

Bitcoin price skyrocketed to 2938 levels (Bitstamp) on Thursday amid reports of BIP 91 locking in. It is currently trading at 2773 levels at the time of writing.

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