Mere hours after their confident announcement that Coinbase had opened their exchange platform, GDAX, for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), GDAX tweeted an immediate halt to trading, following only two minutes of live activity. Although Coinbase is allowing their customers to send and receive payments, no trade is currently being permitted due to the instant escalation of BCH value and its subsequent market volatility.

December 19th's Twitter statement was timestamped with updates, explaining how BCH-USD trading had been halted at 1722 PST due to "significant volatility" and "to ensure a fair and orderly market." Trading was expected to resume for one hour for BCH at 0900 PST on December 20th, but again in post-only mode.

This market volatility could reflect Bitcoin Cash's status as a hard fork of Bitcoin (BTC); Coinbase's BTC holders, who had been left in a vacuum in August when the fork occurred, were automatically supplied with an equal value of BCH in new wallets when it was integrated into the exchange platform. This seems to have caused an immediate logjam, when enthusiastic Coinbase users with new crypto capital went onto the trading platform to spend their windfall BCH.

Coinbase's decision to incorporate BCH trading on its platform was taken only after months spent studying and monitoring its market performance, as well other significant developments in the blockchain technology arena.