Aug 04, 2017 at 14:41 // News

Nina Lyon Author

The Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange has decided to work on adding support for bitcoin cash (BCH) by January 1, 2018. A similar announcement was made by the GDAX (Global Digital Asset Exchange) exchange.



According to the official post on Coinbase’s blog, customers with balances of bitcoin at the time of the fork now have an equal quantity of bitcoin cash stored by Coinbase, and once Bitcoin cash trading is added, customers will be able to withdraw bitcoin cash as well.

“Adding new digital assets to Coinbase must be approached with caution. Not every asset is immediately safe to add to Coinbase from a technical stability, security, or compliance point of view,” stated David Farmer, Director of Comms at Coinbase in the latest blog post.

According to him, Coinbase’s team did not feel they could safely support Bitcoin Cash on the day it was launched, and advised customers who wanted immediate access to their bitcoin cash, to withdraw their bitcoin from the Coinbase before the launch of the hard fork. However, customers who decided to leave their funds on their Coinbase accounts now actually have both bitcoin and bitcoin cash safely stored on Coinbase.

Almost the same announcement was placed a day before on GDAX’s blog. However, if Coinbase wants to add Bitcoin Cash trading support, GDAX will make a determination at a later date whether or not it will also support trading of bitcoin cash. In the meantime, all customer’s bitcoin cash will remain stored on GDAX.

The first Bitcoin Cash block was born five hours later after the launch of the hard fork. Following the launch of the hard fork, the price of Bitcoin Cash was slipping down to $216. However, successful mining of the first blocks gave a little turbo acceleration to BCH and it surpassed a level of $750 for a short period of time. Now, August 4, the price of Bitcoin Cash is about $280.

As we wrote before, the price of Bitcoin Cash is expected to grow as more cryptocurrency exchanges add it. The announcement to add BCH from one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, like Coinbase, may drive this token into the top-3 cryptocurrencies again (by the time of writing this article, BCH is in 4th place, having a market cap of $4 billion).



