While everybody is flipping out about coinbase adding full support (buying, selling, trading) through their mobile application and GDAX. I would like to remind you about something.
Before you read further take a deep breath and calm down... in... out... gooood!
Repeat a few times...
Ready?
Now let's be real here everybody. Coinbase announced the following way back in August:
...
But let's analize the misunderstanding here, people seemed to assume that they meant that it will be available ON January 1st and not before. When they actually meant BEFORE OR ON January 1st. And if you think about it, it would be a stupid decision from a business perspective to add a new coin during or after the holidays. Especially when the crypto frenzy is raging and people are planning to gift cryptos to their friends and family for Christmas.
Between now and the initial announcement. Coinbase did say that they will be listing additional coins as their is a clearly a big demand for them.
If you would have paid attention to the rumours that appeared on social media you would have also noticed the following:
This image appeared 2-3 days ago. Integrating Bitcoin Cash to their API basically screams that they will be enabling trading soon.
People that paid close attention to the news and rumours already knew it will be added to Coinbase. You can hardly call this insider trading.
The fee, mempool and clogging situation.
I mentioned it before but looks like not many investors care or understand this topic, and how out of hand it is getting.
Unconfirmed transactions are currently at ~215.000 and continue to rise. Currently ~37! transactions taking place on a network that can only support about 3!
source:
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
Total mempool size currently above 240MB. Meaning it would take a total of 240 blocks or 2400 minutes / 40 hours / 1.66 days to clear the mempool completely WHILE no additional transactions are happening on the network.
I am sure you might be starting to see the problem here. With 37 transactions per sec happening on the network this can't really happen.
If people want to confirm their transaction quickly they have to pay a higher fee to the miners to get into a block quickly. This escalated over time and resulted in an average fee of 20$ per transaction.
As more people are realizing this problem and are starting to see the 'light'. The more people are switching over to other cryptocurrencies. Not just necessarily Bitcoin Cash. The whole altcoin market rose by 10-50% per coin while Bitcoin was falling downwards which is a rare sight to see.
I don't really want to go in depth about the following videos and articles. But I am sure you will understand how these affect the markets and you can draw your own conclusions afterwards about the current situation.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoincom-cto-denounces-bitcoin-ive-switched-to-bitcoin-cash
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bch-surges-above-2000-following-bitpay-integration-announcement
Companies are adopting Bitcoin Cash payments and are adding support for it at an unusually fast rate which is helping the price for sure, and at the same time Bitcoin is losing support continuosly as the fees to transact through the network are continuing to rise.
And it is understandable. Bitcoin Cash fees are usually less than a cent. Companies would not want to hire a whole squad of customer support people to deal with their daily complaints regarding confirmation times, fees, dropped transactions and etc.
While I don't think the price rise is only because Coinbase announced support for Bitcoin Cash. I would warn anyone to trade on their platform as it is known to be unstable. During times of high traffic, their platform glitches out resulting in big price spikes, as seen previously with Bitcoin when it surged to 25.000 and then immediately dropped back to around 19.000.
I would be careful to trade on their platform especially at times when they release a new coin.
I'm gonna mention 
