The Rise Of Bitcoin Cash Made Coinbase Suspend It, Investigating Insider Trading

Bitcoin Cash is in the news lately – and for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons is it’s growth of more than 250% in only 2 days, another one is the BitPay announcement and the newest one is linked to Coinbase and their suspense following an investigation of insider trading.

As of yesterday, Coinbase suspended Bitcoin Cash  from the platform, meaning that no one could buy or sell it. The Bitcoin spinoff that was launched in August this year has grown massively in value in the midst of a volatile infancy.

According to a report from CoinTelegraph, there is a reason to believe that there was some kind of an insider trading, making the price of Bitcoin Cash arrive to $8,500 on the Coinbase-affiliated exchanges all while being around $3,500 on all others.

[status] Monitoring: All BCH markets will remain cleared and offline until 9am PST 12/20/17. At that time, BCH mark… https://t.co/em9E3MKsrU

— Coinbase Pro (@CoinbasePro) December 20, 2017

This has raised a lot of eyebrows, including the ones of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. He even published an official statement for the situation that said:

“All Coinbase employees and contractors were explicitly prohibited from trading Bitcoin Cash and from disclosing our launch plans over a month ago. This was communicated multiple times via multiple channels to employees…The trading restriction, which applies to all personal trading activity on any platform, remains in effect now.”

Armstrong also added that Coinbase is conducting an investigation about the case. The spike to around $9,000 while BCH was trading at $3,500 everywhere seemed suspicious to many. Reacting to the suspicion, Armstrong added:

“If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies — directly or indirectly — I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action.”

Even though this news crushed Coinbase’s reputation a lot, the company is doing everything they can to investigate potential insider trading and carefully go over all Bitcoin Cash transactions before allowing it on the platform again.