Coinbase, a San Francisco based leading bitcoin exchange and wallet service, has announced that it is adding support for Ethereum, allowing users to easily buy, sell, send, and store Ether in their Coinbase account.
“There has been a lot of activity in Ethereum recently: the largest crowdfunding in history (The DAO), the subsequent attack on The DAO, and a resulting hard fork. Ethereum is still in an early and experimental phase, and as it matures will likely evolve to serve a different purpose than Bitcoin”, Coinbase said. “Ethereum is pushing the digital currency ecosystem forward and we are excited to support it as part of our mission to create an open financial system for the world”.
Coinbase added Ethereum trading on its digital asset exchange GDAX in May. With the addition of Ethereum on Coinbase, consumers in 32 countries can acquire Ether and take part in an open financial system facilitated by Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Furthermore, the blog post also stated that the recently announced Coinbase Buy Widget, a tool for trusted partners to embed Coinbase’s buying service within their sites and apps – also supports ETH purchases in addition to BTC.
Ethereum completed hard fork on Wednesday to undo the DAO hack and users started removing funds in ether soon after the fork. The address for the new smart contract shows 5.04m ETH (at the time of writing), down from the roughly 11.58m ETH (worth $145.2m) available in the original smart contract shortly after its creation. With a market capitalization over $1 billion, it is currently the second largest cryptocurrency.
