Coinbase On Halt With Bitcoin Cash Transactions

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Ever since bitcoin became a mainstream investment, private investors have come to have much thanks for one website, Coinbase.com. Coinbase has made it possible to make bitcoin, litecoin transactions easy and fast. You could even say that Coinbase has contributed to some extent to the growth of the cryptocurrency market. In fact, Coinbase seems to be attracting much more interest from people than some social media networks. Coinbase’s iOS app recently overtook the likes of Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram in terms of number of downloads on the App store. This of course is no easy feat. It shows just how interested people have become in the cryptocurrency market, and this could be why Coinbase chose to spread their wings to newer territories. Coinbase earlier this month had plans of introducing bitcoin cash transactions unto their platform. The exchange service started allowing its customers to buy and sell bitcoin cash on Tuesday December 19,2017, a couple of hours after bitcoin cash started rising in value. However, the San-Francisco tech house has actually withdrawn from delivery of this special bitcoin cash service – temporarily. This decision is definitely for a couple of reasons, with most of them being allegations against the Coinbase platform itself.

Chief executive of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, quickly stepped into the issue when several market analysts and people started making complaints on social media about illegal acts in the bitcoin cash transaction network on Coinbase. He continued to state that before they had introduced the bitcoin cash transaction on their platform, the entire staff had been warned not to disclose a thing about it before it was made public neither were they to trade in bitcoin cash itself before its launch on the Coinbase platform.

Bitcoin Cash And The August Fork

Bitcoin cash is another cryptocurrency that branched out of bitcoin directly during the August 1 fork in the blockchain. What you need to realise is that just like bitcoin, it also is no physical asset. Bitcoin cash was created in the month of August when most developers came to terms that indeed, bitcoin’s transaction time was very discouraging. Thus, bitcoin cash was created – an alternative to bitcoin which managed to work on the blockchain tech used in bitcoin transaction. It tweaked the blockchain such that transactions became a lot faster by allowing more chunk of data to be transferred at a time.

Other coins had diverged from the bitcoin mainstream before the prime occurrence in August. However, what made bitcoin cash stand out even more was the fact that with it, everyone who owned a bitcoin was given its corresponding sum in bitcoin cash – eventually creating money out of thin air. Exchangers like Coinbase initially did not want to recognise bitcoin cash a legitimate cryptocurrency.

The Coinbase Halt

Coinbase chose to halt all of its bitcoin cash transactions after it noticed some inconsistencies in the price valuations. According to the figures available, Coinbase’s figures for bitcoin cash did not tally with that of other sources. As to why this really happened, Coinbase decided to privately investigate into that. When Coinbase begun Bitcoin Cash transactions at 17:20 PST (01:20 BST), bitcoin cash was valued at about $3,500 (£2,612) per coin. Bitcoin Cash is at present, the world’s third biggest cryptocurrency with a total market cap of about $59 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.

Coinbase is yet to give a detailed explanation to the entire public as to whether this was just a software problem or probably deals in bitcoin cash had really reached that peak. However, Brian Armstrong stated that

“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.”