Bitcoin Cash Jumps 70% as Coinbase and Gdax Announce Immediate Trading

Retail and professional cryptocurrency traders can now trade Bitcoin Cash (BCH) on two of the world’s most popular exchanges, Coinbase and Gdax. News of the announcements sent the BCH price to over 3,700 USD as of this writing.

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Bitcoin Cash is Trading on Coinbase Immediately

“We’re excited to announce that customers will be able to buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase,” came word from the Coinbase blog. BCH is quickly becoming the micropayment alternative to bitcoin core (BTC), and as of this writing is the number three cryptocurrency by market cap at just over 58 billion USD. Its price in the last 24 hours has surged over 70 percent.

“Sends and receives are available immediately,” the exchange urged. Coinbase is waiting for “sufficient liquidity” from its Gdax platform before allowing buys and sells. “We anticipate that this will take a few hours.”

Bitcoin cash was the result of an August 1st hard fork this year, with miners and enthusiasts signaling for larger block sizes to ease mempool congestion, lagging transaction times, and rising fees on BTC.

Coinbase is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, boasting over 13 million users. This year has seen it collect as many as 100,000 new accounts in a single day. The San Francisco-based exchange has been in operation since 2011.

Bitcoin Cash is Trading on Gdax

“Our customers should benefit from forks,” Coinbase continued. The company claims to operate “by the principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from forks or other network events. This is essential in our mission to make Coinbase the most trusted, safe, and easy-to-use digital currency exchange,” it posted.

The exchange reminded customers how those “who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Your Bitcoin Cash balance will reflect your Bitcoin balance at the time of the Bitcoin Cash Fork,” the company clarified.

Simultaneously, Adam White of a Global Digital Asset Exchange (Gdax), a cryptocurrency platform for professionals, posted, “We’re happy to announce that Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is now listed and available for trading on Gdax.”

Gdax “made the decision to list BCH by considering such factors as customer interest, developer support, network security, market capitalization, trading volume, and our Digital Asset Framework.”

Warning again of liquidity, Gdax listed the order books as BCH–BTC, BCH–USD, and BCH–EUR. As of 19 December, 16:06 PST, the Gdax monitoring page alerted “BCH order books are currently in post-only mode. New maker orders will be accepted, but no matches will occur. Regular trading will be enabled shortly.”

By later in the evening, Coinbase and Gdax abruptly suspended trading of BCH, leaving customers on social media outraged. The BCH price rose above 8,000 USD, and then quickly fell back to a little over 3,000 USD, causing still more observers to claim insider trading at the fact such a huge sell-wall was erected just as the exchange went dark.

The Coinbase family of products, which includes Gdax, has a reach of 25 countries by exchange, and its wallet is available in nearly 200 nations across the globe.

What are your thoughts on Coinbase and Gdax trading bitcoin cash? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Pixabay, Coinmarketcap, and Coinbase. Kai Sedgwick contributed sourcing.

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that enables near-instant, low-cost payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: transaction management and money issuance are carried out collectively by the network. Read all about it at wiki.Bitcoin.com.