ViaBTC recently announced that its new exchange, Coinex, will be the first in the world to trade exclusively in BCH pairs. The exchange, which was incorporated in the UK on December 4th, will launch later this month. Initially, Coinex will offer BTC/BCH, ETH/BCH, LTC/BCH, ZEC/BCH, and DASH/BCH pairs; there are plans to eventually offer margin and futures trading, as well as to launch a platform for over-the-counter trading.
The launch of Coinex comes in the wake of the forced closure of ViaBTC’s previous exchange, which was shut down by the Chinese government as part of the sweeping cryptocurrency bans that took place in September of this year.
According to Sara Ouyang, ViaBTC’s chief operating officer, the choice to use BCH rather than BTC as the primary trading currency on Coinex is because “it has much faster transactions with low fees and better performance in terms of usability.”
Bitcoin Cash – a Steady Climb?
It is true that Bitcoin Cash does have a block size that is eight times larger than Bitcoin’s, which theoretically allows the Bitcoin Cash network to confirm eight times more transactions per second than the Bitcoin network.
However, suspicions of the BCH network’s centralization arose after the cryptocurrency spiked from around $625 to nearly $2000 before falling back around $1000, all within a 4-day period in mid-November. BCH has still not managed to return to the heights achieved during that period.
Seemingly, ViaBTC has long had a rather cozy and productive relationship with BCH. When ViaBTC’s exchange was still operating in July of 2017, it became the first exchange ever to offer futures trading for Bitcoin Cash. According to a report from News.Bitcoin.com, BCH futures were trading at about $325 a pop at the time.
As Bitcoin continues to become more popular as an investment as well as a sort of pop-cultural movement, Bitcoin Cash is still lagging behind the coin by about $260 billion in terms of market cap size. Although Bitcoin is still facing the same problems with scalability that it has had for several years, it seems unlikely that Bitcoin Cash will become the cryptocurrency of choice anytime soon, if ever.
Still, the Bitcoin Cash network is faring relatively well. Just last month, BCH underwent a fork (software upgrade) that aimed to improve the network’s Difficulty Algorithm Adjustment. The result was an end to the “erratic block time intervals” that have occasionally caused problems on the network, according to News.Bitcoin.com.
News.Bitcoin.com also reported that “BCH has witnessed a consistent increase in the number of transactions processed on its network,” an indication that the network is attracting more users. It is quite possible that the launch of the Coinex exchange, and other exchanges like it, could encourage even more BCH trading and adoption.
(Photo: ViaBTC)
