BTG launched with the mining of a 100,000 coin Endowment to support the Bitcoin Gold Organization, ensuring the growth and longevity of the project. These coins were mined into multi-sig wallets for security, and the majority were also time-locked with release over the next three years. Although this is a tiny fraction of the coin supply (about one half of one percent), this ensures funding for the project’s development and support for at least three years (and, if the value grows, perhaps indefinitely.)

We’ve made important changes in our version of Bitcoin to accomplish our project’s objectives: decentralizing the mining infrastructure and returning the ability to mine to people everywhere.

There are also important things to note that unchanged in Bitcoin Gold: We’ve maintained full SegWit support, including the capabilities of Lightning Network, which should be enabled by several wallets for BTG by the end of Q2, 2018. We are a Friendly Fork to Bitcoin and support the growth of the technology.

Our philosophy of making the minimal changes necessary to accomplish our goals but retaining all the latest developments which continue to be built into Bitcoin has established Bitcoin Gold as a valuable coin which has endured and is rising. This growth is not from the initial “launch hype,” and not from massive marketing spending. It’s coming from the genuine realization that we are building real value, and restoring the network effects that Bitcoin lost when it was no longer mineable by most computer owners in the world.

In the nine weeks since our launch, we have seen:

• Support from over 30 exchanges, including many top exchanges
• Support on the top 5 wallets, including the top hardware wallets (Trezor and Ledger)
• Support from major institutional services like BitGo, Integral and Uphold

And in our first 90 days, we’ve reached global transaction volume of $7 trillion (as of Feb, 2018). The groundwork has been laid for broad adoption of a valuable cryptocurrency, but we know that it’s still early days, and there’s much future work to be done.

Our deep similarity to Bitcoin tends to make technical implementation easier, once certain hurdles are crossed (such as sweeping to new wallets on the new blockchain). We also perform community outreach: we support meetups, attend international conferences, help real-world merchants (both ecommerce physical) to accept Bitcoin Gold among other crypto currenices, we educate new crypto currenices users, and – price willing – we hope to actively support the expansion of crypto to un-banked and under-served markets throughout the world.

If you support these goals and ambitions, perhaps your exchange should support Bitcoin Gold.

All of our code has always been publicly available at Github, and a handy guide to the critical technical changes from BTC to BTG for developers can be found here. We are always looking for new partners to support decentralization of every aspect of the crypto ecosystem, which includes the creation and growth of exchanges based in different parts of the world, serving more and more global user bases. We would be happy to offer technical support in implementing Bitcoin Gold with your systems, as well as have a point of contact in case of emergencies.