GBTC Trust Announces Plans For Bitcoin Cash Fork

Despite being somewhat unclear on other forks, there was a press release from Greyscale that discussed Bitcoin Cash distributions for GBTC shareholders.

See: Nov. 3rd’s Bitcoin Investment Trust Provides Update on Bitcoin Cash Distribution and Remittance of Cash Proceeds (a follow up to Oct 25th’s Bitcoin Investment Trust Announces Record Date for Distribution of Bitcoin Cash and Remittance of Cash Proceeds).

The latest press release confirms they are selling the Bitcoin Cash and distributing it holders of the trust.

The implication seems to be that whoever holds the trust on November 6, 2017 (the “record date”) at market close will be privy to the Cash (a little odd since the block snapshot date was in August; but reasonable as it rewards people for being in the trust at the time when the Cash was liquidated).

This confirms previous hints that this was the direction Greyscale would take (the first real confirmation was the Oct. 25th press release, but they had discussed the option earlier).

“The Trust currently holds approximately 173,014 coins (or units) of Bitcoin Cash, or approximately 0.09258535 coins of Bitcoin Cash per share based on 1,868,700 shares of the Trust outstanding as of the date hereof and expected to be outstanding as of the Record Date…. the distribution to the Record Date Shareholders on the Record Date is expected to be approximately 0.09231058 coins of Bitcoin Cash per shareholder [its a little less than the total owned by shareholders because Greyscale had to pay advisors and fees to the agent selling on their behalf].” – From the Nov. 3, 2017 Press Release

For the future, this means that, unless things change, you’ll want to be in GBTC on the Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Segwit2x “record dates.” Now that we know this, we’ll make sure to have an eye out and to post the information to our site.

When will funds from GBTC’s Bitcoin Cash sale be distributed? If you owned GBTC on the record date (Nov. 6) you should see a deposit from the Bitcoin Cash sale after the sale is made and funds are distributed. The process can take time, and we haven’t seen any specifics mentioned by Greyscale. We’ll keep you updated. You can also update yourself by looking at the resource section on Greyscale’s site.

TIP: Don’t forget the Segwit2x fork is coming up. There is a good chance we’ll see some price fluctuations before and after the fork and this could obviously affect GBTC (for better or worse depending on what Bitcoin does).

OPINIONS: This is not the worst case, but while this is an acceptable method for Bitcoin Cash… it is still not what I would consider the best method moving forward. You can see my opinions on how the trust should handle forks in the future here.