Buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase
We’re excited to announce that customers will be able to buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase. You can read more about Bitcoin Cash on our FAQ page.
Sends and receives are available immediately. Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours. See our update below.
Our customers should benefit from forks
Coinbase operates by the principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from forks or other networks events. This is essential in our mission to make Coinbase the most trusted, safe, and easy-to-use digital currency exchange.
Bitcoin Cash was created by a fork on August 1st, 2017. All customers 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, which occurred at 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017. You can read more about what a bitcoin fork is here and our previous update on Bitcoin Cash here.
We have been monitoring the Bitcoin Cash network over the last few months and have decided to enable full support including the ability to buy, sell, send and receive. Factors we considered include developer and community support, security, stability, market price and trading volume. You can learn more about Bitcoin Cash here.
We will abbreviate Bitcoin Cash as BCH on our platform. Customers will be able to buy Bitcoin Cash using all of our supported fiat currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD and SGD.
Coinbase maintains a strict trading policy and internal guidelines for employees. Coinbase employees have been prohibited from trading in Bitcoin Cash for several weeks.
Update on December 19 at 8:15pm
Bitcoin Cash sends and receives are functional. Buys and sells on the Coinbase website and in our mobile apps will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will happen tomorrow.
Coinbase has just added full support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – meaning you can now send, receive, buy and sell the cryptocurrency. All users will also be credited an amount of Bitcoin Cash equal to their Bitcoin balance during the hard fork that occurred August 1st, 2017.
Bitcoin Cash trading will also be available on GDAX, Coinbase’s institutional-focused exchange.
Update: As of now both Coinbase and GDAX seem to be experiencing intermittent outages and Bitcoin Cash trading has been suspended, so it may take some time until traffic settles down and Bitcoin Cash is actually available for trading.
Immediately after the announcement Bitcoin’s price fell as much as 25% to a low of $14,000, but seems to have stabilized around $16,600 as of writing, which is still down about 10% from a few hours ago.
Bitcoin Cash is up around 50% in the last few hours, trading around $3,300.
As a refresher, Bitcoin Cash was created when Bitcoin “forked” in early August, by a group of developers who wanted to alter Bitcoin’s code so the blockchain could process more transactions at a faster speed, as well as require a much lower fee. When Bitcoin core developers disagreed, a group decided to copy and modify Bitcoin’s code to create Bitcoin cash.
Originally Coinbase said they wouldn’t support Bitcoin Cash – but quickly reversed course on August 3rd to say that customers would be able to withdraw it by January 1st, 2018. However they stopped of short of saying whether or not they’d provide full support and allow it to be bought and sold. So today’s full addition of the digital currency comes as a surprise for anyone who follows the cryptocurrency world.
In a blog post, Coinbase said they considered ” developer and community support, security, stability, market price and trading volume” when deciding to fully support the digital currency. Additionally, they gave some (brief) rational behind the decision:
“Coinbase operates by the principle that our customers should benefit to the greatest extent possible from forks or other networks events. This is essential in our mission to make Coinbase the most trusted, safe, and easy-to-use digital currency exchange. – Coinbase
Coinbase has made it clear they want to support many more digital currencies in the future, so in one sense it should be expected that the’ve added the third largest currency by market cap. But it’s a little more complicated considering there’s some drama behind Bitcoin Cash, mainly in the form of ongoing disagreements between the development teams about discrediting the other’s protocol.
Going forward, the company has a framework that will help guide it in deciding which digital currencies or assets to add next, and have said they expect to add more starting in 2018.
Featured Image: Coinbase
Update: We’re still waiting to hear directly from Coinbase on exactly what went wrong, but the company put out a series of tweets confirming that GDAX trades (and Coinbase buys/sells) will be disabled until tomorrow morning.
GDAX also tweeted a brief note that trading was paused after “significant volatility” in the two minutes that BCH-USD trading was live, but hasn’t provided any additional clarity.
After just announcing full support for Bitcoin Cash, buying and selling on Coinbase and GDAX is temporarily disabled. For about an hour Coinbase and GDAX were both showing Coinbase Cash prices at around $8,500, which is almost three times higher than the $3,500 price it’s trading at on all other exchanges.
But for most of this time trading was disabled, so it’s not clear if any trades were actually executed at the higher price that was temporary shown on GDAX and Coinbase.
Right now there seems to be a ton of confusion if the $8,500 price was accurate or not. But since no other exchanges are showing similar prices, it’s very likely that this $8,500 price was some sort of pricing glitch and not the actual price the broader market was assigning to Bitcoin Cash.
As of 20 minutes ago the company said they are canceling the entire Bitcoin Cash order book on GDAX, and will provide another update soon. Buying and selling Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase itself remains down.
[status] Monitoring: All BCH books will enter cancel-only mode, and all existing orders will be cleared. While in c… https://t.co/em9E3MKsrU — GDAX (@GDAX) December 20, 2017
We’ve reached out to Coinbase for more information, and will update this when we hear back.
After the company’s announcement, Bitcoin Cash was added on Coinbase and GDAX simultaneously. This is important to note because the liquidity (and price quotes) to buy and sell cryptocurrency on Coinbase come from GDAX, its sister exchange. So essentially a stable order book is needed on GDAX before Coinbase buy and sells can be functional.
This is why in the past the company has added assets (like Litecoin) to GDAX months before being added on Coinbase, so there could be sufficient liquidity at launch. On Twitter, Coinbase’s Ex-Director of Engineering Charlie Lee clarified that it’s “operationally very hard” to add an asset to both platforms at the same time.
The company did give GDAX traders an hour and twenty minute window to “post” trades in order to establish liquidity before the market went live.
In hindsight, Coinbase should have listened to me. It was operationally very hard to launch on Coinbase and GDAX at the same time. Now with GDAX halted and Coinbase never opened, everyone is seeing a ridiculous price of $9500. 🤦♂️ tons of support tickets and upset customers. — Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) December 20, 2017
We’ll update this when we hear back from Coinbase.
Featured Image: Bryce Durbin
Shortly after the sudden news it would add support for the cryptocurrency bitcoin cash, U.S. exchange startup Coinbase has already moved to disable trading of its newest asset.
Announced today via a blog post to users, the decision to add the cryptocurrency, the third-largest by market capitalization, comes months after developers backing the effort cloned the bitcoin blockchain, effectively creating a competing network that claimed to enable a greater volume of transactions.
Using a mechanism called a hard fork, however, the project created unique complications for exchanges, as by copying bitcoin's ledger at the time of the split, Coinbase users who held bitcoin were effectively owners of bitcoin cash as well.
As such, a sudden influx of users armed with capital appears to have put a strain on the exchange, the most well-capitalized in the U.S. market.
At press time, buying and selling of bitcoin cash were disabled on the platform, with the last quoted price listed at nearly $9,000, more than $6,000 above the market price of $2,900, according to data provider CoinMarketCap.
According to the exchange's official status blog, trading was disabled after about four minutes after it began. Trading went live at 17:20 PST and was pulled back to post-only mode at 17:24, records show.
"All BCH books will enter cancel-only mode, and all existing orders will be cleared. While in cancel-only mode, no new orders will be accepted. We will post an update shortly," the exchange wrote at 18:30 PST, and later tweeted.
The service outage does not appear to have affected either the exchange's other assets or its Coinbase brokerage service, which allows users to buy and sell bitcoin, ether and litecoin.
Representatives for Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Coinbase.
Trading image via Shutterstock
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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.
