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Coinbase just added support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which means you can now send, receive, buy and sell the cryptocurrency. In addition, all users will be credited an amount of Bitcoin Cash equal to their Bitcoin balance during the hard fork that occurred on August 1st, 2017, almost 5 months later. This news is what cause a major buying rally and spiked Bitcoin Cash to around 60% gain at the time of this writing.
Coinbase BCH Outage
Right now, both GDAX and Coinbase are experiencing outages due to the massive volume spike. Coinbase is most notable for their ability to constantly have outages when big cryptocurrency rallies are in effect. No user can currently buy or sell Bitcoin Cash as of yet. This announcement forced regular Bitcoin down to nearly $14k but since then the price became stable around $17k.
Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin cash is a hard fork of bitcoin. This was a team of developers who initially wanted to alter bitcoin’s code to make the blockchain process more transactions at a faster pace while also reducing fees. Bitcoin core developers disagreed so a group copied and modified bitcoin’s code to create Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin cash is surprising because it is a spinoff of bitcoin. Bitcoin cash is seen by some as a clone and just a get rich quick scheme aimed at increasing developer’s profit. There are also ongoing arguments about discrediting each other’s protocols. Coinbase did mention that they would serve their customers in their best interest when forks do occur which is probably a main factor in adding BCH support.
More coins in the future.
Coinbase did say they will be adding more coins in 2018, but didn’t elaborate any further. It does make sence that they would add cryptocurrencies by their currency market cap since those contain the most investor interest. Many people in the crypto community (myself included) think they will begin to add more of the highest market cap coins to include Ripple, IOTA, and Cardano in the future. Coinbase did put out a framework for future cryptocurrencies to consider before they will list them on their exchanges.