I want to push back on the framing here, because it reads like exchange approval is the gate. It isn’t, and it never has been, and never should be. Between upgrades we do “BCH bank runs”, “not your keys, not your coins”, “we will displace fiat!” but now we seek permission and offer them power over our protocol!? This kind of framing bothers me.
Outreach is informative, not decisive. The CHIP’s legitimacy doesn’t come from Binance’s blessing, and it never has. Exchanges don’t get a veto over BCH upgrades — and they’ve never asked us for permission before changing a confirmation policy or a listing. The asymmetry cuts both ways. We don’t owe them deference, and they won’t give us binding statements anyway: we’ve reached out ahead of past CHIPs and the large exchanges simply don’t respond. Their silence has never been the gate before, and it shouldn’t be now.
The forks (2017, 2018, 2020) were special cases. A fork is special: there are two chains, and exchanges have to pick a side, so they follow liquidity and the incumbent ticker. A regular upgrade has one chain. There is no side to pick — an exchange either updates its node or it’s off the network in May. That’s a maintenance task, not a political decision. And the empirical record is clear: exchanges delist over volume, legal risk, or chain splits — not over routine upgrades.
They get the signed release and ~6 months. That’s roughly seven times what Zcash gave its downstream in 2019 (five weeks from mainnet release to activation), and it went through without incident. The exchanges will get the memo the same way they always do — the official release — and they’ll have half a year to prepare. If they wanted to weigh in earlier, the door has been open since the CHIP went public a year ago.
So what is the outreach actually for? Three things, none of which is permission:
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Blast-radius mapping. The real concern isn’t Binance — it’s the long tail of smaller exchanges and services that don’t have floors of devs and might not update in time, leaving users with broken experiences. Knowing that ahead of activation lets us target the nudges where they’re needed. That’s logistics, not legitimacy.
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The paper trail. If a service misses activation, the outreach record means it’s their failure, not BCH’s. We’ve seen this before: a service goes down on upgrade day, checks its inbox, and finds it was contacted multiple times and dropped the ball. That’s the value of having asked.
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Satisfying our own process. Several of the conditional approvers in this thread have made “have you talked to the exchanges?” a condition of their support. We run the outreach to answer them, not to get Binance’s approval.
On “if the feedback is positive, the answer becomes obvious”: the answer is already obvious from the endorsements in this thread — Maxbit, a regulated brokerage, has told us they treat fast-block coins at 2–3 confirmations and trust that more than 0-conf. That’s the headline case, witnessed by a real counterparty. What the exchanges tell us is how much of the benefit is headline versus fallback — not whether the upgrade is right. If Binance keeps low confirmation counts, great, that’s Maxbit’s answer again. If they scale up 10×, the CHIP still stands on variance reduction, DeFi recovery, and the progress-bar effect, none of which depend on exchanges at all. If they say nothing — the most likely outcome — that’s fine too, because their silence has never been the gate.
We’ll keep the outreach going and log it, because it’s cheap and it’s the right thing to do. But we shouldn’t wait for it, and we shouldn’t treat it as binding. The exchanges are stakeholders to inform and de-risk, not arbiters of whether Bitcoin Cash upgrades. That’s been true for every CHIP before this one, and it’s true now.
, that for the sake of survival of this project, 