Users who weren’t able to claim their bitcoin cash in the wake of this month’s hard fork now have a better chance of retrieving their lost funds.
Announced this week, BTC.com has launched a recovery tool for the cryptocurrency, one designed to let users whose wallets didn’t support the switch to claim their coins.
Because users of some services still technically own bitcoin cash (but don’t have access to it), the tool allows them to “extract” bitcoin cash from their wallets by exporting the keys and, then, moving the currency into a new, supporting wallet.
If it sounds complex, it is. To put it simply, when bitcoin cash split from the bitcoin blockchain, anyone who owned bitcoin as the two networks parted ways were suddenly allocated an equal amount of bitcoin cash. However, many users were unable to access their new funds because the contentious and fast-moving fork caught many digital wallet providers off guard.
While some wallets supported the currency from the get-go, others decided against it because of concerns about confusing customers and a lack of technical resources to integrate the new cryptocurrecy.
In a blog post, BTC.com’s online marketing manager, Nikol Daru, explained why the tool was needed, saying:
“Recovering bitcoin cash from a bitcoin wallet in a do-it-yourself manner can be a risky process that requires serious expertise. That’s why we have developed this designated recovery tool, to make the process easy and seamless for everyone.”
There’s one big caveat, however: the service only works for specific wallets. According to the blog post, Blockchain and Mycelium are compatible with the tool, as well as unnamed others.
The launch will likely come as a relief to some in the community, including some who support bitcoin cash’s technical roadmap and others who desire gains from holding or selling off the new asset.
And those funds are looking increasingly worth retrieving. A swift climb in price in the last 24 hours has seen bitcoin cash overtake Ripple as the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. At press time, bitcoin cash is valued at $506, according to CoinMarketCap.
