Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp has announced that it will launch bitcoin cash trading pairs during the first week of December.
When bitcoin cash forked away from the main bitcoin blockchain at the beginning of August, many people were skeptical that it could garner enough support to remain viable. Consequently, quite a few cryptocurrency exchanges and services — including Bitstamp — took a wait-and-see approach to the fork.
However, nearly four months after the fork, bitcoin cash retains the third spot in the market cap rankings and is currently trading near $1,200 per coin. As a result, more services are rolling out support for bitcoin cash. Last week, wallet service Blockchain announced that plans to add full support for bitcoin cash. Now, Bitstamp has elected to add support for bitcoin cash to its trading platform, which currently only supports four cryptocurrencies: bitcoin, ethereum, ripple, and litecoin.
“We have enabled Bitcoin Cash to meet our customer demands. Since we always try to remain neutral we didn’t have any unusual reservations, but we did want to make time to see how the market responded,” Bitstamp CEO Nejc Kodrič told CCN.
The exchange says that bitcoin cash will launch with support for three three trading pairs: BCH/USD, BCH/EUR, and BCH/BTC.
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As to whether bitcoin and bitcoin cash can coexist peacefully or one must necessarily “defeat” the other, Kodrič believes the market can support both cryptocurrencies — even if they maintain the same mining algorithm.
Unless anything changes in the market, we don’t see why the two cannot coexist and continue to be viable currencies. They can coexist and serve different use cases,” he said. “We view the two as different currencies. It is ultimately up to the market to decide how they view the relationship between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.”
Kodrič’s view is shared by many industry observers, including Andreas Antonopoulos, who recently admonished advocates for each cryptocurrency to stop treating the markets like a zero-sum game. Others, however — including Blocktower Capital CIO Ari Paul — have a more bearish outlook, anticipating that the competition for hashpower and branding will preclude the two projects from ever reaching a long-term truce.