Bitcoin Cash, the spin-off created by a hard-fork in Bitcoin in August this year is in the news. Bloomberg reported that on Tuesday Coinbase, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, enabled trading in Bitcoin Cash on its platform, which led to a massive 62% surge in the cryptocurrency’s prices.
Ether has long been chasing down Bitcoin and its champions have been waiting for “the flippening” – the day that Ether overtakes Bitcoin. Ironically, it is now Ether that is being chased down by the number three cryptocurrency – Bitcoin Cash.
With the new boost that Bitcoin Cash has been given by Coinbase, the cryptocurrency’s market value has jumped to $73 billion. Which is close on the heels of Ether’s $79 billion market cap.
This is despite the fact that Ether has also been outperforming the market for the last couple of weeks. In fact, Ether’s value has also bounded by $50 billion since the last week of October. Bitcoin, the first – always the first – has, in the same time period, tripled its market cap to almost $300 billion.
According to one of the first promotors of Bitcoin, Roger Ver, Bitcoin Cash will overtake even Bitcoin soon. He feels that Bitcoin’s bull-run is soon to come to a close. The reason he give is simple: Bitcoin Cash is a faster and cheaper cryptocurrency, but as reliable to use as Bitcoin.
The 62% rise of Bitcoin Cash is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Yahoo! Finance, the last 24 hours have been seriously turbulent for Bitcoin Cash. Just four hours after the cryptocurrency started trading on the Coinbase platform, Coinbase had to suspend trading. In that time, the cryptocurrency shot up to a staggering $8000 before subsiding to more familiar territory. However, the reason for the shut-down was accusations of insider trading by Coinbase employees who had prior knowledge about the launch of Bitcoin Cash.
The suspicion of insider trading was highlighted because Bitcoin Cash started gaining in value before Coinbase’s announcement. This led people to believe that some employees of Coinbase who knew that Bitcoin Cash was going to be launched on their platform took advantage of the information and did some insider trading. This has led Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong to announce that while there was no indication of wrongdoing, the company would investigate the issue.
Armstrong also stated that all Coinbase employees had been banned from trading in Bitcoin Cash for the last few weeks. The company has a very strict policy of non-disclosure with regard to all “material non-public information” (meaning new assets) being added to its platform. The CEO emphasized that this non-disclosure policy has been communicated repeatedly to all employees over the last one month.
He stated that if accusations of insider trading were found to be true, they would find the culprit and ensure that he or she was terminated immediately and legal action would be taken against that person.
However, according to Naked Security by Sophos, this stance did not mollify irate investors as they took to Twitter. People criticized the company and its employees for the so-called insider trading that was taking place.
Coinbase has been amongst the large number of exchanges that have refused to trade Bitcoin Cash. However, according to Armstrong, this stance changed about a month ago as the exchange saw how popular Bitcoin Cash was becoming.
Coinmarketcap has ranked Bitcoin Cash number 3 in amongst most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, with a current market cap of $60.25 billion. Bitcoin Cash prices have stabilized and trading is at $3,400 at the moment.
Leave a Reply