Coinbase may have given away its own Bitcoin Cash surprise

On Tuesday, when Bitcoin Cash hit Coinbase, the popular user-friendly U.S.-based exchange, cryptocurrency’s reputation as the financial wild west was on full display.

While anyone following along was well aware that Coinbase planned to add Bitcoin Cash, the currency created in August’s Bitcoin hard fork, things still got weird immediately. After some suspicious pre-launch climbing, Bitcoin Cash’s Coinbase launch immediately saw prices soar to almost three times those listed on other exchanges.

That “significant volatility” led Coinbase to freeze transactions for its newest asset, creating plenty of confusion in the process. Just a few hours later, the company disclosed that the chaos had prompted an insider trading investigation, a surprising concession after some in the cryptocurrency world cried foul (to be fair, they are often crying foul).

While it’s not yet wholly clear what was going on, many digital currency enthusiasts have pointed to a Reddit thread from three days ago titled “ATTN: Bitcoin Cash added to Coinbase API (EXTREMELY BULLISH)” that claims to have spotted evidence of Bitcoin Cash’s addition on a Coinbase API key permissions screen.Given its broad disinterest in regulatory norms and preponderance of first-time investors, doctored screenshots trying to nudge prices one way or another are fairly common within the cryptocurrency community. Still, many Reddit users appeared to lend this particular thread enough credence to check it out for themselves. (Unfortunately, as Bitcoin Cash is now live, we weren’t able to verify the listing’s early appearance in the API.)

Again, Coinbase users knew that Bitcoin Cash was coming by January 1, 2018 — the deadline Coinbase gave itself in August — but most users assumed that the new coin would be withdrawal-only, letting Coinbase users who stored Bitcoin on the exchange at the time of the fork get their trapped Bitcoin Cash out of the platform. As Coinbase stated in its August 3 blog post: