One of the US’s leading crypto-currency exchanges is carrying out an insider trading investigation.<\/p>\n
Coinbase fears its own workers may have exploited its move into Bitcoin Cash – a spin-off of the original Bitcoin.<\/p>\n
The San Francisco-based firm announced the move after Bitcoin Cash’s price jumped.<\/p>\n
Coinbase began letting its users\u00a0buy, sell, send and receive Bitcoin Cash<\/a>\u00a0on Tuesday in a surprise decision but has temporarily suspended trade.<\/p>\n The company’s chief executive intervened after several market watchers posted allegations of illegal activity on social media sites.<\/p>\n Brian Armstrong responded that he had repeatedly warned his staff not to disclose its launch plans to family or friends or to trade in the digital asset themselves.<\/p>\n “It appears the price of Bitcoin Cash on other exchanges increased in the hours before our announcement,”\u00a0he wrote on the news site Medium<\/a>.<\/p>\n “If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies\u200a – \u200adirectly or indirectly\u200a – I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action.”<\/p>\n Bitcoin Cash – which is no more tangible than Bitcoin itself – came into being in August after several developers became frustrated at lengthening transaction times for the original crypto-currency.<\/p>\n Bitcoin Cash addressed this problem by tweaking the underlying technology – the blockchain – to allow bigger chunks of data to be processed at a time.<\/p>\n Although there have been other Bitcoin splits before, this “fork” was unusual in that everyone who owned the original virtual currency was offered a matching sum of Bitcoin Cash. This effectively created money out of nothing.<\/p>\n However, many exchanges, including Coinbase, initially refused to support the innovation, casting doubt on its prospects.<\/p>\n Claims of insider dealing were not the only hitch that Coinbase experienced when it finally added support for the new asset.<\/p>\n Trade of Bitcoin Cash\u00a0was frozen just four minutes after it began<\/a>\u00a0on the firm’s Global Digital Asset Exchange (Gdax) and existing orders were cancelled.<\/p>\n The move seems to have been a reaction to an apparent price surge in Bitcoin Cash on the platform beyond its already elevated level elsewhere.<\/p>\n When Coinbase launched Bitcoin Cash at 17:20 PST (01:20 BST) it was valued at about $3,500 (\u00a32,612) per coin.<\/p>\n At the time it suspended it, the company was quoting a price of about $8,500. It remains unclear whether or not this was a software glitch or if deals were really being made at this level.<\/p>\n Coinbase has yet to give a full explanation but has said that it intends to reopen Bitcoin Cash\u00a0order books later on Wednesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bitcoin Cash is currently the world’s third biggest crypto-currency with a total market capitalisation of about $59bn,\u00a0according to Coinmarketcap<\/a>.<\/p>\n That compares with there being $77bn worth of Ethereum and $282bn worth of the original Bitcoin.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"