The bitcoin gold development team has announced that it is adding support for two-way replay protection ahead of the network's expected launch.

Bitcoin gold

is a fork of the bitcoin network, created with the primary aim of restricting the use of specialized chips for bitcoin mining through a change in the code. The effort is backed by an open-source community of relatively unknown developers, as well as LightningASIC, a seller of mining hardware based in Hong Kong.

The addition of replay protection is intended to prevent users from sending both bitcoin gold and bitcoin when making a transaction meant to occur on just one chain – a necessity owing to the shared code between those two networks. Without the measure, a user might inadvertently send their coins to a different address, losing control of them in the process.

"In order to ensure the safety of the bitcoin ecosystem, Bitcoin Gold has implemented full replay protection, an essential feature that protects users' coins from being spent unintentionally," the developers wrote in a new blog post.

The announcement of replay protection comes before bitcoin gold is available to users. Currently, the network is technically private, accessible only to the development team (who are updating the code and mining blocks as they go). In the absence of actual coins, exchanges like Bitfinex have begun trading futures connected to the cryptocurrency, which are currently trading between $140 and $170, according to CoinMarketCap.

The new blog post also indicated that a public test network will be launched sometime later today.

"[The] Bitcoin Gold team will deploy a public testnet opens to miners from all over the world in a few hours," they wrote.

Gold nugget image via Shutterstock