By Mason Mohon | @mohonofficial

On Friday, Bitcoin.com reported that Bitcoin Cash will soon be facing a hard fork, per the actions of developers.

On May 15, 2018, Bitcoin Cash will hard fork and its protocol consensus rules will be updated.

Bitcoin ABC lead developer Amaury Séchet hinted at a fork a few months back. Séchet explained then that it would be better to have a fork after the new year. Fast forward to this week, and we can see that version 0.17.0 has been released, which has the code to change consensus rules.

Because there is no specific block height announced for the fork to occur at, it is expected that we will see a similar situation to the BCH fork from BTC last year. The method it will use is the MTP, or “Median Time Past” method.

So on Tuesday, May 15 at 12:00:00 UTC, 2018 when the MTP takes place with the most recent 11 blocks equal to or greater than 1,526,400,000, the very next block will activate the hard fork.

Bitcoin ABC makes clear that those running an ABC node should upgrade, and a testnet will soon be available for other clients. Furthermore:

The most notable change is the increase of the maximum block size to 32 MB — There are also several bitcoin script operation codes (op-codes) being added or reactivated.

They have informed the community not to fear. They plan that this hard fork will go smoothly, similar to the one in November of 2017.

Featured image source.