Disclaimer: In light of feedback received about this article, Cointelegraph would like to reiterate that Bitcoin Classic is not the original Bitcoin chain, but an altcoin.

Bitcoin Classic has confirmed it is shutting down as developers claim Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will become ‘Bitcoin’ by May 2018.

In an official statement Thursday, release manager Tom Zander praised BCH and said its validity meant that Bitcoin Classic had “fulfilled its promise.”

“It is now up to you which chain will gain the most traction. It is now up to the next billion people to start to use Bitcoin Cash. In at most six months I'm sure we'll just drop the ‘Cash’ and call it ‘Bitcoin,’” he stated.

BCH shot up in price over 35 percent in anticipation of a new hard fork set for Nov. 13, reaching its highest value almost since it debuted.

In the aftermath of SegWit2x’s apparent failure, funds appear to be flowing into the rival Bitcoin fork as investors hedge bets over a duplicate chain appearing.

“The fact that the Legacy chain is stuck at 1 MB, and likely always will be, confirms the Cash chain's viability. Now the market will decide,” Zander added.

Until news of the hard fork, BCH had largely held a sideline position beyond significant publicity efforts led by Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver.

Now, further public support is coming from cryptocurrency figures including Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Finnish Pirate Party and regulator commentator.

With recent developments, I'm putting all available dev resources to retool my software for #Bitcoin Cash. I suspect I'm far from alone. — Rick Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) November 9, 2017

Ver himself this week also confirmed Bitcoin.com would only advocate and deal in BCH.

Bitcoin Classic is a fork of Bitcoin that was initially launched on February 10, 2016. The soon-to-be-defunct project’s aim was to increase the transaction capacity of Bitcoin by increasing the block size limit.