GDAX announced on January 17th that they had started trading in Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at 0900 PST (1700 UTC). BCH (which resulted as a hard fork from Bitcoin (BTC) in August 2017) was added by Coinbase in December, and the price of BCH took a giant leap at that time. The price showed a strong response to the new announcement, with increases on that day\'s trading of around 12%. By January 18th the coin was already trading at $1,798.66.

GDAX is the currency exchange platform affiliated to (and owned by) Coinbase, but they are not one and the same thing. Coinbase have not indicated that any other cryptocurrencies will be added to their portfolio at this time.

The cryptocurrency community as a whole demonstrated no particular interest in the news, mainly owing to problems cause by GDAX’s delay in implementing the SegWit protocol. Many users are still concerned about network congestion, owing to the high demand by popular services (including Coinbase, Gemini and Blockchain), who are making inefficient use of available block space. Coinbase had previously promised at the end of 2017 to integrate the SegWit protocol, but has been too slow, in users’ opinion, to do so. SegWit would theoretically allow for faster and cheaper transactions, but Coinbase is not the only cryptocurrency service delaying its implementation.