Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Two months after it added Ether to its professional trading platform Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX), the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase launched Ether trading for retail customers as well.
Now the general consumers can easily buy, sell, send and store Ether in their accounts. The option is available through the “Trade” section on Coinbase’s web page or through the “Buy” and “Sell” tabs in the mobile trading application.
The announcement comes a day after the successful completion of the Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) hard fork. The “reset” of the system was triggered after much debate in the cryptocurrency community, but was deemed the only viable solution after the DAO security breach in June when a hacker stole $50 million worth of Ether, by exploiting a technical loophole in the blockchain.
The hard fork was completed in several hours on July 20 and the majority of miners, exchanges and other major apps on the decentralized platform chose to follow the new version of the Ethereum blockchain and recovered around $40 million of the stolen Ethers.
Several days before the expected date of the hard fork, another of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges – Kraken – temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals of Ethers in its platform. It said the restoration of the service may take a few days, but announced via its Twitter account that deposits and withdrawals are restored just a few hours after the hard fork completion.
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.
