Coinbase dominated headlines over the space this week with a set of significant developments. The San Francisco-based exchange announced on Monday, June 11, its intention to include Ethereum Classic to its trading platform and quickly followed the news headlines on Tuesday with the state opening of a crypto index fund. Its addition to the exchange has revamped public fascination with Ethereum Classic and sent the price tag on its native currency, ETC, right into a dramatic state of flux.

Ethereum Classic

On June 18, 2016, hackers successfully exploited a weakness in the splitting function of the protocol that allowed for the extraction of ether from multiple DAO smart contracts while employing the same DAO tokens. The outcome was a theft of 3.6 million ether that has been worth roughly $70 million.

Debate arose within the Ethereum community regarding an effective response to the attack. Following a failed soft fork, a vote in July figured a hard fork will be instituted to erase the DAO hack by placing the compromised ETH in a fresh smart contract that could then be utilized to redistribute the funds with their original owners. Your choice, though approved by way of a super most 89 percent, was extremely controversial. Anti-forkers contended that even though DAO hack was unfortunate, code is law. All transactions are innately immutable and really should remain clear of modification or censorship, whatever the justification.

Once the hard fork was implemented on July 20, through the mining of the 1,920,000th block, some dissenters continued to aid the original ledger and therefore created what is now referred to as Ethereum Classic (ETC).

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The Addition of ETC to Coinbase

On Monday, ether (ETH), s.-based crypto exchange. Since its inception in June of 2012, Coinbase spent some time working to distinguish itself as the utmost secure and legitimate of the major crypto exchanges. Despite operating in an area where rapidity of technical development is heavily valued, Coinbase has fostered a cautious method of expansion, priding itself on a way that’s both meticulous and methodical.

The integration of alternative coins in to the Coinbase platform has, by industry standards, progressed at a crawling pace. The initial expansion of its trading portfolio premiered in-may of 2016, when it included support ether (ETH). Support because of its third currency, litecoin (LTE), had not been released before following May, while its latest addition, bitcoin cash (BCH), was only added earlier this December.

In each case, Coinbase has followed a systematic preparation process, a trend which will continue by adding Ethereum Classic. Via the Coinbase blog:

Engineering Work

We shall now begin the engineering work (Step 4) for supporting Ethereum Classic. Within this process, customers can get to see public-facing APIs along with other signs that the asset has been added. When we reach the ultimate testing phase of the technical integration, which we be prepared to occur over the next couple of months, we shall publicly announce a launch date for trading via our blog and Twitter (Step 5).

Once the final stage of technical integration is reached, Coinbase will announce the date which its prime and pro customs will start placing limited orders of ETC. When this resting market reaches sufficient liquidity, live trading will commence on the open platform.

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The announcement also continued to reassure its GDAX customers who held ether before the July 2016 hard fork they would receive Ethereum Classic credits once trading is launched. However, this distribution will not connect with the Coinbase customer interface since it did not support Ethereum during the fork.

The marketplace response has been mixed. The initial five hours of trading following the announcement saw the price tag on ETC soar 25 % from $12.88 to $16.11. Since this peak, the purchase price has experienced a turbulent ride, crossing the $13.50 mark four times before settling at $13.79 during writing of the article.

The Index Fund

On the heels of the news, first announced back early March, is currently open for investment.

In cases like this, the fund will be made up of every one of the assets currently supported by Coinbase, divided proportionally with their market capitalization. The existing composition of the fund is really as follows: Bitcoin 61.47, Ethereum 27.17, Bitcoin Cash 8.22 and Litecoin 3.14. When Ethereum Classic is officially put into the platform later this season, the fund’s composition will undoubtedly be altered to take into account ETC’s additional market cap, which currently sits at only over $1.4 billion.

The index fund is bound to accredited U.