As Bitcoin splits in two, many exchanges including Coinbase don't support Bitcoin Cash fork
the new digital-currency that surged 122% in less than a day Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE : Bitcoin price holds as alternative cryptocurrency makes its debut Stan Higgins / CoinDesk : Bitcoin Cash Just Mined its First Block, Making Blockchain Split Official Bloomberg : Bitcoin Slide Looks Limited Even After Cryptocurrency Splits David Lumb / Engadget : Bitcoin feud splits the currency in two Shivdeep Dhaliwal / Cointelegraph.com News : Bitcoin Forks Into Two, New Era Dawns For Bitcoin Aaron van Wirdum / Bitcoin Magazine : A Beginner's Guide to Claiming Your “Bitcoin Cash” (and Selling It) Adnan Farooqui / Ubergizmo : Bitcoin Has Split, What Now? — The power brokers behind Bitcoin … Ken Hodler / KeepKey : Bitcoin Cash and KeepKey Shannon Liao / The Verge : Bitcoin has split in two, so you can have double the cryptocurrency Stergios Georgopoulos / Neowin : Bitcoin splits in two; The first ‘Bitcoin Cash’ block has been mined Grace Noto / Bank Innovation : Bitcoin Cash Kicks Off, and Then the Wait Begins Colm Gorey / Silicon Republic : Splitcoin: Two rival bitcoin currencies now exist, but what does that mean? Joon Ian Wong / Quartz : The indicator that will show whether bitcoin has split Msmash / Slashdot : Bitcoin Splits in Two Amid Feud Jonathan Garber / Business Insider : Bitcoin is sinking as bitcoin cash goes live Evelyn Cheng / CNBC : Bitcoin falls, new ‘bitcoin cash’ briefly leaps nearly 50% then dives as digital currency splits Jeff John Roberts / Fortune : Bitcoin's New Currency Trades Above $200 on First Day Jack Morse / Mashable : Warring factions are splitting Bitcoin in 2. Here's what you need to know. William White / Stock Market News … : The new version of bitcoin is available in larger blocks Tweets: Loic Le Meur / @loic : Great all we needed was two bitcoins it wasn't complicated enough http://twitter.com/... Jeff Roberts / @jeffjohnroberts : Bitcoin Cash trading >$200. Will mean HUGE pressure for @coinbase to allow withdrawals http://fortune.com/... @coinbase : Bitcoin withdrawals are now enabled. All Coinbase services operating normally.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff of a schism Coinbase helped create: back in February 2016 it threw its weight behind Bitcoin Classic in the block-size fight, positioning itself as a partisan in the community's civil war rather than neutral infrastructure. When the August 1 hard fork finally split the chain, Coinbase chose not to support the resulting Bitcoin Cash asset — meaning customers who held bitcoin on the exchange at the moment of the split had no way to reach the new coin trading above $200 within a day of debut.
The stance lasted days. Within the week Coinbase reversed itself and committed to supporting Bitcoin Cash by January 1, 2018, while Fortune reported the fork was putting undue pressure on exchanges and wallet providers like KeepKey to pick sides.
First-order effects
- Coinbase customers who held bitcoin through the August 1 split cannot access or sell their Bitcoin Cash allocation on the platform, even as the new coin surges roughly 122% on outside markets.
- Every other exchange and wallet provider that declined support faces the same immediate gap between what customers technically own post-fork and what they can actually transact.
Second-order effects
- Customer pressure and the new asset's fast appreciation force a rapid policy reversal — Coinbase commits to Bitcoin Cash support by January 1, 2018, effectively conceding that ignoring a valuable fork is untenable for a consumer exchange.
- Wallet makers such as KeepKey are pushed into the same decision under the same pressure, turning fork support from an engineering question into a competitive differentiator among custodians.
Third-order effects
- If every future chain split repeats this pattern, exchanges and wallet providers become the de facto gatekeepers deciding which forks gain liquidity and which die unsupported — distribution-layer decisions hardening into protocol governance.
- Custodial platforms inherit a recurring liability: each split creates assets owed to customers that the platform must either support, convert, or explicitly disclaim, making fork-handling policy a standing part of exchange operations.
The trend: As Bitcoin forks multiply, the exchanges and wallets that hold customer keys — not the developers who split the chain — will determine which resulting coins become real markets.