As Bitcoin splits in two, many exchanges including Coinbase don't support Bitcoin Cash fork
Bitcoin-themed balloons at the “Inside Bitcoins: The Future of Virtual Currency Conference” in New York. — Bitcoin power brokers were unable to come behind a single solution that would have preserved …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff of a schism Coinbase helped inflame: back in February 2016 it publicly threw its weight behind Bitcoin Classic over the block-size dispute, positioning itself as a partisan in the governance fight rather than a neutral custodian. The August 1 hard fork made that partisanship costly — the chain split in two, and Coinbase along with many other exchanges chose not to support the new Bitcoin Cash asset at launch.
First-order effects
- Customers who held bitcoin on Coinbase at the moment of the split have no way to access or sell the Bitcoin Cash created from their balances, since the exchange does not credit or trade the forked asset.
- Every other exchange and wallet provider that declined support faces the same immediate customer-service problem: users' forked coins exist on-chain but are unreachable through the platforms they actually use.
Second-order effects
- User pressure proved decisive fast — within days Coinbase reversed course and committed to supporting Bitcoin Cash by January 1, 2018, signaling that non-support is not a stable position for a retail-facing exchange.
- As Fortune's coverage of the fork notes, the untested Bitcoin Cash chain is putting undue pressure on exchanges and wallet providers broadly, forcing each to pick between engineering costs of integration and the reputational cost of locking users out of assets they believe they own.
Third-order effects
- Chain splits are becoming recurring governance events that force custodial platforms to act as de facto arbiters of which version of a cryptocurrency gets liquidity — a role that sits awkwardly with their neutrality claims and invites regulatory scrutiny of how forked assets are handled.
- If every contentious hard fork triggers this same scramble, exchanges will need standing fork-handling policies rather than ad hoc reversals, effectively making them co-governors of open blockchain networks alongside miners and developers.
The trend: Contentious blockchain forks are turning exchanges like Coinbase into the decisive gatekeepers of which surviving chain retains market access.