DEATH BY TWITTER POLL: Kraken explains rationale behind Bitcoin SV delisting

Kraken, which said late Tuesday that it would be removing the notorious Bitcoin SV coin from its exchange, today gave an explanation for the contentious move.

“Among many red flags, we noted the threatening and openly hostile behavior of Bitcoin SV representatives. We hoped the situation with Bitcoin SV would improve over time but unfortunately it has not,” an unidentified spokesperson wrote in an email. “Over the last few months, the team behind Bitcoin SV have engaged in behaviour completely antithetical to everything we at Kraken and the wider crypto community stands for.”

Bitcoin SV’s lead developer, Craig Wright, had been terrorizing Twitter with a legal campaign against people who had doubted his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Binance was the first to delist, followed by ShapeShift.

Kraken, after a period of consternation, came yesterday.

“Alongside other upstanding members of the community, and in consultation with more than 70,000 members of the community, we have decided to delist Bitcoin SV according to the following schedule,” the exchange wrote.

“In consultation with more than 70,000 members of the community” is a strange way to characterize a Twitter poll—on April 15, Kraken had polled 70,545 respondents on whether it should delist the cryptocurrency. The options: “Yes, it’s toxic,” “no, need price discovery.” “no, it’s awesome” and “don’t care.” The first option came through with a landslide 71 percent of the vote.  

It’s more likely that Kraken just felt the jig was up. As the exchange itself noted in its email, it originally “warned clients in a blog post that it did not meet our usual listing requirements,” yet deigned to list it anyway.

Bitcoin SV deposits will supposedly be disabled April 22, trading will cease on all BSV trading pairs on April 29, and BSV withdrawals will continue until May 31. Unless, perhaps, something that happens on Twitter causes a change of heart.