Over the last couple of months we have seen a continued rise in popularity and increased use of Bitcoin in the markets we operate. With increased popularity, comes a higher demand and there has been a global need to increase the Blockchain’s capacity to achieve faster transactions and low fees. The community has been exploring different ways of achieving this goal.

What this means is miners will need to upgrade their hardware and software. There are currently 2 categories of parties involved in this transition:

1. The SegWit or User Activated Soft Fork (UASF): this group wants the capacity of every Bitcoin block to be increased by reducing the size of each Segregated Witness (SegWit) embedded in it.
2. The SegWitx2 or Miner Activated Soft Fork (MASF): this group proposes that, in addition to the Segregated Witness, the size of the whole block should be expanded from its current size of 1MB to 2MB.

In view of this, BitPesa is preparing for the potential Bitcoin fork on 1st of August 2017 by making a few temporary changes to the system to protect our customers from any potential loss during/after the potential Bitcoin fork.

1. We will temporarily disable bitcoin buying/selling on 31st July 2017 at 6pm EAT. We will notify everyone once the service is restored. All other payouts will not be affected. If there are any changes to this timeline, we will inform you.
   1. We’ll also update the number of confirmations required for a transaction to complete from 1 to 6 confirmations due to activation of the mentioned fork/upgrade. Transaction processing will be slower as a result. We will update you on the way forward after this period.