Coinbase has added a new buying option for its customers after the crypto exchange introduced Ethereum Classic to its collection.
The addition was first announced in July but Coinbase took its time to implement its newest addition following criticism over the way it added Bitcoin Cash last year. Allegations of insider trading led the company to investigate the incident which saw service outages and wild price fluctuations for Bitcoin Cash right after its addition to the exchange. It later introduced a framework for adding new tokens.
Nonetheless, Ethereum Classic’s value spiked 20 percent on last month’s news. Today, though, it is down two percent over the last 24 hours, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
Coinbase has taken a conservative approach to adding more crypto. Today’s addition takes it to five tokens — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are the others — but that’s likely to change this year. Last month, it announced it is “exploring” the addition of another five tokens while CTO Balaji Srinivasan hinted that the selection would grow further when I interviewed him at the recent TechCrunch blockchain event in Zug.
“We hear your requests, and are working hard to make more assets available to more customers around the world,” Dan Romero, who heads Coinbase’s consumer business, said in a blog post published today.
A note on Ethereum Classic — it was created in June 2016 following a major hack on The DAO, a fundraising vehicle for the project. In short: the Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum — that rescued the lost funds, while those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic.
Update: the Ethereum Foundation has been in touch to ask us to correct the above because it doesn’t create versions of Ethereum; it’s the community / ecosystem that created the new version. “Governance in Ethereum works as researchers and developers propose changes, any/all interested parties debate those things online and on live-streamed calls, things that earn consensus are developed into reality by different clients teams (that create software to support that users need to later run), and users download and run those things,” the spokesperson said.
Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.