Users will very soon be able to hold, buy and trade Bitcoin Cash (BCH) on Coinbase — it’s now listed on the exchange as well as on GDAX. The company added the crypto to its original offering of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin starting Tuesday, December 19th. The move boosted the BCH price to over $3,000, and proved so popular that Coinbase was forced to stop accepting new orders within hours.
Coinbase’s GDAX platform halted BCH trading at 17:24 PST, around one hour 20 min after it started. At press time, it is still not accepting new orders and BCH books will remain offline until 09:00 PST on Wednesday December 20th. The exchange is publishing live status updates on its official page.
Coinbase Announces Addition of Bitcoin Cash
In a move than came sooner than even optimists anticipated, the Coinbase team announced it would allow trading of Bitcoin Cash on its platform — something that wasn’t expected until the new year, if at all. A few days ago, we reported it as a rumor sparked by some eagle eyes looking at their API settings.
According to the company blog, sending and receiving will be immediately possible for those that were credited BCH from the August 1st fork. Trading the currency will take some time, however, as they are waiting for “sufficient liquidity on GDAX” something they see taking a few hours.
The currency will officially be abbreviated as ‘BCH’ and will be available to purchase in the future using all of supported fiat currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD and SGD.
Bitcoin Cash Announcement Signals Start of Altcoin Expansion
The official acceptance of Bitcoin Cash was not a complete surprise on the part of Coinbase, considering Coinbase’s president heavily hinted at the possibility during a CNBC interview a few days prior.
In addition, he also hinted at the addition of other cryptocurrencies other than BCH — with some believing the exchange will list other top currencies such as Ethereum Classic (ETC), since it once allowed withdrawals in the currency.
Additionally, Coinbase released guidelines detailing how new digital assets would be considered for listing on the exchange. CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, also explicitly told viewers during a CNBC interview that the exchange was planning on adding “many more” altcoins in 2018.
In any case, it seems that the addition has caused a huge influx of traders into Coinbase — causing the site to temporarily go offline.
Source: https://www.bitsonline.com/breaking-coinbase-lists-bitcoin-cash/