Coinbase adds bitcoin cash, giving momentum to bitcoin rival

[HONG KONG] Coinbase, one of the most popular US cryptocurrency exchanges, is adding bitcoin cash to its offerings, giving momentum to a rival to the most popular digital unit.

The San Francisco-based exchange said in a blog post announcing the move that all customers who held a bitcoin balance at the time of the fork creating bitcoin cash Aug 1 will see an equal balance of the rival coin in their account.

"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," the exchange said. "Factors we considered include developer and community support, security, stability, market price and trading volume."

Bitcoin cash emerged earlier this year amid a split between factions in the cryptocurrency space over proposed software upgrades to the blockchain technology underpinning bitcoin. Coinbase, which at one point this month was the top free application in Apple's App Store download ranking, already offered ethereum and litecoin in addition to bitcoin.

"Bitcoin cash is a very legitimate contender," said Bobby Lee, chief executive officer of BTC China. "Bitcoin has faced a lot of scaling issues with the block sizes and so on, so I think bitcoin cash has solved a lot of these issues and is a strong, legitimate contender to be more widely used." Bitcoin has soared to new highs this month as regulated US derivatives exchanges in Chicago started trading futures in the unit. It was recently at US$17,025.45, about 13 percent off its record high on Monday, but still up about 1,700 per cent this year.

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