Another look at forks.green Chia Fork Exchange

A few weeks ago we got our first look at forks,green, a Russian Chia Fork exchange that lets you buy, sell, and trade the chia fork coins that you might have farmed or exchanged on the Chia Fork Traders discord. When I first took a look at it, I thought that was a little sketchy but it seemed to work. You can check it out here.

I still think its a little bit sketchy, but a lot less so. I have talked to the person who runs it, they also go by forks.green on discord, and they seem genuinely interested in improving the service and building this up. And improve it they have, with a LOT of the site working significantly better, as well as significantly busier.

I was able to recently sell a large number of CGN (Chain Green) for XCH and then withdraw it to my hot wallet. I was required to configure Google Authenticator two-factor authentication and it did take a little while on their site, but it worked in the end. But they have had issues with withdrawals, according to users in their discord. Forks.green tells me that they did resolve them and I had a chance to ask them about the whole thing.

So what happened is that a small number of users were able to exploit a small programming bug in the software, possibly just a misplaced bracket but getting the details was above the limits of Google Translator. Forks.green told me that they were able to turn off transfers fairly quickly while they resolved the bug and they were even able to recover all the mistakenly withdrawn coin. This is the incredible part, apparently a few of the users even contacted forks.green directly in order to return the extra coin. They said they got everything back, and are totally back in business.

This is where I started to have troubles. Forks.green is Russian and I am Canadian and our only common language is some rusty high school French. So we had to agree to continue the interview when we could find a real translator who would help us communicate. If this describes you and you would like to help, please reach out to me basically anywhere. They are very interested in being accessible to the community, and frequently offering support in their discord channel. I would love to get a real insight into what they are doing here in their own words.

Forks.green does not want to be sketchy, they just don’t speak English. That is not the same thing and I think we should give them the same benefit of the doubt as we give anyone who does speak our language. From what I can tell this is a labour of love, and there are a LOT of hours put into this. This is not their day job, its a hobby and one that consumes a lot of their life. There are risks to using it, of course, I mean its an unlicensed coin trading exchange without a huge team managing security and technology. There is a withdrawal fee on XCH, which means this person is getting paid, but as a relatively painless way of turning fork coin into XCH it is really nice it exists.