The ongoing debates surrounding consensus, scalability and governance of decentralized system have led many in the Bitcoin community to believe that there’s a possibility of an hard fork on the horizon. I want to take this opportunity to let Jaxx users know that you will never need to take any actions leading up to a hard fork. I’d like to also provide more information to our users and the community on how Jaxx handles events, such as hard forks, and how we make our business decisions regarding similar situations.

Let’s first start off by explaining what a hard fork is. Due to the governance structures of decentralized blockchains, there will always be a level of dissent between important participants of the networks. Under certain circumstances, due to dissent among these participants, a fork of the blockchain occurs resulting in two competing chains that move in different directions. Although these blockchains will share identical information up until the fork occurs, coin holders would end up with funds on both chains along with identical private and public keys.

At Jaxx, we don’t pretend to be oracles or speak on behalf of our users or entire communities. Although we attempt to predict where the space is moving and make business decisions accordingly, we’ve learned over the years that taking a “hard stance” tends to be counterproductive, especially when situations rarely end up playing out as many would expect.

Jaxx is a multi-currency wallet that supports many blockchains and technologies with plans to support many more. Think of us as a multi-platform interface (or browser) for blockchains that allows users the ability to view, control, manage, exchange, send, and receive many of the leading digital currencies available today. Given this multi-chain multi-technology approach that provide users choice and control, we believe competition to be invaluable and we will continue to support emerging blockchain technologies and projects that we believe have merit.

The most important thing to know when dealing with hard forks is that Jaxx users really need to do nothing on their end: You don’t need to move your funds before a fork, nor do you risk losing your funds after. Unlike an exchange that holds the keys to your funds, one critical feature of Jaxx is that users are in full control of their keys. Jaxx doesn’t have access to your funds (keys are created and stored client-side and never sent to our servers), nor are we custodians of your funds (blockchain holds the funds). No matter what decision we make once we’ve evaluated the results of a fork, users will always be able to export their private keys individually or altogether via a Backup Phrase, and import them into another service The difference with holding your funds on an exchange is that you are always at their mercy regarding decisions they make; you do not have control of the keys to your funds, they do.

I’ll reiterate that with Jaxx there is nothing you need to do leading up to a hard fork. Should a fork occur, know that we will monitor the situation and events following the fork. We will also provide guidance to our users and details of any actions we plan to undertake as a result of the fork. One suggestion I will make is to occasionally check our social media channels and our in-app bulletin messages (Menu -> Bulletin) for any alerts or messages that might impact our users.

Sincerely,

Anthony Diiorio

CEO & Founder, Jaxx