Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Coinbase, the bitcoin-only exchange and wallet announced it will add the ether (ETH) cryptocurrency to its offering, starting from May 24. Initially trading ether against the USD and the bitcoin will be available only to professional traders, but later in the summer the company plans to introduce it for all its users.
Additionally, the company said it will rebrand its professional trading platform Coinbase to Exchange to Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX), while the name Coinbase will remain for the wallet and the retail service for exchanging dollars to bitcoins and ether.
Adam White, Coinbase’s vice president of business development, told Retuers the move was provoked by the rising interest in ether and the progress of the Ethereum platform. “We have seen hundreds of emerging decentralized apps (applications) launched on Ethereum,” he said.
The cryptocurrency decentralized platform Ethereum was launched in the end of July 2015. It creates decentralized applications and generates the cryptocurrency ether. Initially traded for $1, the current price of ether is $14.66 and has been on the rise, with an increase of 7.71% in the last 24 hours, shows the coinmarketcap.com website. There are 80 199 860 available ethers, worth almost $1.2 billion. In the last 24 hours were traded ethers worth a little over $61 million.
This places the ether at the second place in value after the bitcoin, which is worth $442.4 apiece and has a market capitalization of $ 6,9 billion.
Last week the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange announced it will start offering ether dark pool trading. In April Japan’s largest exchange bitFlyer also added trading in ether to its portfolio. Some “regular” forex brokers, like FXOpen also offer ether.
Coinbase was established in 2012 in San Francisco and is believed to be the largest bictoin-focused company in terms of investment. According to the CurnchBase website, since its establishing in 2012, Coinbase has attracted investments totaling $106.71 million in four rounds. It operates exchanges between bitcoin and fiat currencies in 32 countries, and bitcoin transactions and storage in 190 countries worldwide.
Coinbase Exchange was launched in 2015. It is based on real-time pricing and offers exchanging of bitcoin and flat currencies. It is available to customers in 42 US states plus Washington DC, Canada and the UK. In March Coinbase Exchange announced it is introducing the stop order option for bitcoin.
