The price of ethereum classic, the cryptocurrency that was hard forked off the ethereum blockchain in July 2016, surged for 25 percent on Tuesday, following the news that it is being added to crypto exchange Coinbase for trading.
The U.S. exchange announced on Tuesday morning in a blog post that it is now starting the engineering work to integrate ethereum classic with its platform. A further date for formally launching the trading of ethereum classic on Coinbase will be announced on Sept. 5, the company said.
Data from CoinMarketCap shows that the price of ethereum classic started to jump around 01:30 UTC on Tuesday, after Coinbase first tweeted out the announcement at 01:18. It has further surged from $12.88 to as high as $16.15 at around 2:00 UTC, reflecting a 25 percent gain in just half an hour.
The move also comes just months after Coinbase reiterated in March that it had not made any decisions for adding new assets, following a similar note made in January.
"The internal asset selection committee has been assessing assets using our Digital Asset Framework, but no assets have been recommended to the Coinbase executive team," the company said at the time. Yet Coinbase has not explained what has made a difference in the past three months that led to the change of the thinking of its asset selection committee.
Also notably, the decision to add ethereum classic arrives after some in the industry had questioned Coinbase's asset selection process to be "random, if not altogether dubious."
As previously reported by CoinDesk, the reason for such question partially stemmed from that Coinbase added support for bitcoin cash, just months after the cryptocurrency was created out of a hard fork from the bitcoin blockchain. Yet at that time, the firm had not embraced ethereum classic after a year since the cryptocurrency was hard forked off the ethereum network.
Coinbase image via Shutterstock
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