When will coinbase sell bitcoin cash

The cryptocurrency exchange added Bitcoin Cash, a new currency that split from the original bitcoin in August. That means anyone who was holding bitcoin when it forked into two currencies in August will now see the same number of bitcoins as Bitcoin Cash tokens in their account today. But it doesn’t mean people doubled their money. On Aug. 1 at the time of the split, Bitcoin Cash was worth $ while bitcoin was worth $2,, so the bitcoin cash amount that will appear in Coinbase now will be significantly less than the bitcoin customers are holding. The split happened when a small faction of bitcoin developers demanded a version of the currency that allows the use of virtual miners to process more transactions by increasing the size of transaction bundles known as blocks. Coinbase users will be unable to withdraw bitcoin cash until Jan. 1,

Learn more about Bitcoin Cash

The price of bitcoin cash soared after Coinbase announced that it would add the world’s third-largest digital currency to the assets it supports.

“If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies — directly or indirectly — I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action,” Coinbase founder and chief executive officer Brian Armstrong wrote on Medium.

According to pricing website CoinMarketCap, the price surged % to $3,, an all-time high. However, trading was extremely volatile, and a huge range of prices were quoted on different sources. GDAX, Coinbase’s exchange, showed the price at $9,, a gain of more than % on the day.

Almost immediately after trading was allowed, Coinbase and GDAX suspended bitcoin-cash trading, apparently until traffic settles down and liquidity is established. Separately, Coinbase is now investigating potential inside trading at the company, as its employees could have traded bitcoin cash in recent months anticipating its addition to the exchange platform this week.

Based on CoinMarketCap’s price, Bitcoin Cash currently has a market capitalization of about $37 billion. More than $ billion worth of bitcoin cash was traded on Dec. 19, the highest since Nov.

While the entire cryptocurrency universe has seen record interest this year — thanks to the massive price appreciation in the original bitcoin BTCUSD, , as well as Ether, the second-largest digital currency — it is still a fairly small and illiquid market. Because Coinbase is one of the most popular ways for retail investors to buy and sell the asset class, the addition of a new cryptocurrency on the platform can drive heavy interest.

Read: Bitcoin once again the ‘world’s most crowded trade’, fund managers say

“Coinbase holds unusual power to ‘make’ a given cryptocurrency,” wrote Nick Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research in a newsletter. “As they add other currencies, those will see a notable price bump as well.

Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, recently speculated that if Coinbase granted access to other digital currencies beyond the three it currently does — bitcoin, Ether, and Litecoin — those would rise as a result. Meanwhile, bitcoin would decline amid the higher competition for retail dollars. The price of bitcoin fell % to $16, on Wednesday; it traded above $19, earlier this week.

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“There are only three coins on the platform,” Brown wrote last week. “If there were five or ten, isn’t it more likely that they would all individually be worth less per coin, because Coinbase retail people would have more places to spread their bets? Wouldn’t the price of Bitcoin be lower if the most popular platform were not ‘Bitcoin maximalist’?

There are more than 1, digital currencies, according to CoinMarketCap, though most are extremely small. Still, more than are valued at more than $ million, and 28 are valued at more than $1 billion.