Crypto News

New Coinbase Additions: Ethereum Classic and Crypto Index Fund

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Ethereum Classic

In May of 2016, The DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization and venture capital fund, raised a sum of $150 million for investment in smart contract projects built on the Ethereum blockchain. It was, at the time, the largest crowdfunded project ever created.
On June 18, 2016, hackers successfully exploited a weakness in the splitting function of the protocol that allowed for the extraction of ether from multiple DAO smart contracts while utilizing the same DAO tokens. The end result was a theft of 3.6 million ether that was worth roughly $70 million.
Debate arose within the Ethereum community regarding a proper response to the attack. After a failed soft fork, a vote in July concluded that a hard fork would be instituted to erase the DAO hack by placing the compromised ETH in a new smart contract that would then be used to redistribute the funds to their original owners. The decision, though approved by a super majority of 89 percent, was extremely controversial. Anti-forkers contended that although the DAO hack was unfortunate, code is law. All transactions are innately immutable and should remain free from modification or censorship, regardless of the justification.
When the hard fork was implemented on July 20, during the mining of the 1,920,000th block, some dissenters continued to support the original ledger and thus created what is now known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).
The Addition of ETC to Coinbase
On Monday, via blog and Twitter, Coinbase announced that during the coming months it intends to add support for Ethereum Classic (ETC) to its exchange platform. The currency will join bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), litecoin (LTE) and bitcoin cash (BCH) as the fifth digital currency supported by the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange.
Since its inception in June of 2012, Coinbase has worked to distinguish itself as the most secure and legitimate of the major crypto exchanges. Despite operating in a space where rapidity of technical development is heavily valued, Coinbase has fostered a cautious approach to expansion, priding itself on a method that is both meticulous and methodical.
The integration of alternative coins into the Coinbase platform has, by industry standards, progressed at a crawling pace. The first expansion of its trading portfolio was launched in May of 2016, when it included support ether (ETH). Support for its third currency, litecoin (LTE), was not released until the following May, while its most recent addition, bitcoin cash (BCH), was only added this past December.
In each case, Coinbase has followed a systematic preparation process, a trend that will continue with the addition of Ethereum Classic. Via the Coinbase blog:
The announcement also went on to reassure its GDAX customers who held ether prior to the July 2016 hard fork that they would receive Ethereum Classic credits once trading is launched. However, this distribution does not apply to the Coinbase customer interface as it did not support Ethereum at the time of the fork.
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