Bitstamp, one of the oldest crypto exchanges and the third-largest in the world for USD and EUR trading of Bitcoin, announced that it would provide trading support for Bitcoin Cash in December.
According to the announcement, Bitstamp decided to support Bitcoin Cash (BCH) after seeing high demand for it by customers as well as a part of its effort to list more currencies. At the moment, Bitstamp offers trading only in other four cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP)
The Bitcoin Cash launch is scheduled for the first week of December. Bitstamp will provide support for trading BCH with USD, EUR, and BTC.
This is the complete announcement:
Dear customers,
In response to the demand we have been seeing for Bitcoin Cash trading (BCH) and as part of our efforts to list more currencies, we have decided to provide trading support for the following three pairs: BCH/USD, BCH/EUR and BCH/BTC.
The launch is scheduled to occur in the first week of December.
Please stay tuned to our Facebook page, Twitter feed and website announcement page for further details.
Best,
The Bitstamp Team
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a hard fork of the original Bitcoin blockchain with upgraded consensus rules to allow scaling. It was born as a hard fork of the Bitcoin's ledger at block 478,558 on August 1st, 2017. It immediately raised the block size limit to 8MB as part of a massive on-chain scaling approach.
Bitstamp CEO, Nejc Kodric, said to Forbes.com that the exchange's move to support BCH is part of its strategy to be “as agnostic as possible”. “If we believe there is sufficient demand and there will be trading and trading volume, we’re going to list it,” he noted.
Despite the recent failure of the Segwit2X project to scale Bitcoin as it was provisioned in the New York Agreement (NYA) which Bitstamp did not sign, Kodric acknowledges that a part of the community supports an increase in Bitcoin block size, something that Bitcoin Cash already offers.
“There are still people out there who think Bitcoin should have larger blocks, and right now Bitcoin Cash provides them with exactly that,” said Kodric.
“I think that’s why some of the demand emerged — SegWit2x didn’t happen, so some of the attention pivoted toward Bitcoin Cash.”
The accussations about possible market manipulation that pumped up and then dumped the price of Bitcoin Cash in just 48 hours do not seem to worry Kodric. On November 12, just hours before a new hardfork, Bitcoin Cash price skyrocketed to $2,500, a jump of 300 percent from price levels of $800 less than two days earlier. It has since dropped to about $1,200, and some inside the community talked about market manipulation.
BCH Prices Starts To Surge
After the Bitstamp announcement, the Bitcoin Cash price saw a surge in other exchanges, such as Bitfinex.
