As the Bitcoin Cash(BCH) hard fork which is scheduled on November 15^th, the ongoing battle between Jihan Wu’s Bitcoin ABC developers and Craig Wright’s nChain sees a new turn with the former lashing out at Coingeek for its recent report about Bitmain’s debts. Coingeek has taken side with Wright in the BCH’s upcoming upgrade debate.

Bitmain’s Co-Funder and CEO Jihan Wu took on to twitter on November 4 to shot down the widely-spread rumor about Bitmain’s debt trouble and being on verge of losing its key chip maker, by saying that the rumormonger, Coingeek, was controlled by Fake Satoshi- a term he used to describe Craig Wright. Wright has long described himself as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin, but without private keys to back his assertions.

In its recent report, Coingeek, a news source and mining pool primarily focused on Bitcoin Cash, claimed it had heard from multiple sources close to Bitcoin mining manufacturer Bitmain that the company is no longer receiving chips from its chief supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company TSMC. The report further stated that Bitmain’s account with TSMC is reportedly in arrears to the tune of over $300 million. Bitmain owed TSMC $1 billion but could only manage to pay $700 million and is unable to pay the remaining debts.

The Beijing-based crypto mining giant dismissed the rumor immediately and told the Chinese news outlet Odaily that “Coingeek keeps making up malicious rumors about Bitmain, and it has no credibility. We hope other media outlets do not quote the fake news and can refer to the company’s most recent financial report.”

In fact, Bitmain stated in its prospectus released in September that the company should prepay roughly half of total payment to TSMC. “It takes an average of approximately three months from the time we place our orders to the delivery of the wafers. Pursuant to our arrangement with TSMC, we usually prepay TSMC for fabrication prior to delivery,” the company wrote in the prospectus. The delays in full payment is a way for Bitmain to reduce cost, but it does not mean the company is unable to pay the remaining debts.

In addition, TSMC has commented on November 5 concerning Bitmain’s debt and also denied the rumor. Sun Youwen,a spokesperson for TSMC, said in an interview with Bitnance that “ TSMC has a trusting relationship with all clients. And there is nothing wrong with clients’ payments for now”.

The proposed hard fork of Bitcoin Cash is the reason behind Wu’s verbal fight with Wright. Wu and Bitcoin ABC believe that increasing the blocksize limit will centralize the mining activity because only larger-scale miners will be able to process larger blocks. Craig Wright and his nChain, however, are taking the opposite stance: they propose raising BCH’s blocksize to 128MB, increasing the processing capacity of the network at the expense of increased mining centralization. The hard fork will determine the future of the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap.