This will undoubtedly bring a new level of visibility to Ethereum Classic, which is a decentralized smart contract platform similar to Ethereum. In fact, Ethereum is a so-called hard fork of Ethereum Classic; it was created in July 2016 and the two projects share their blockchain history up until that point, though Ethereum got to keep the original name.
Dan Romero, the vice president and general manager at Coinbase, acknowledged that the cryptocurrency community generally responded to the ETC integration with astonishment. He emphasized that Coinbase’s decision to integrate ETC was mainly fueled by its compliance with local regulations.
“Seeing some head-scratching on this one [ETC integration]. We’ll continue adding as many assets as we can in a secure and compliant manner. Building a brand that’s most trusted and gives customers direct access to cryptocurrency with USD, EUR, GBP requires being compliant with local laws,”
Coinbase also explained why it specifically chose to add Ethereum classic, even though there are a lot of other prominent cryptocurrencies in the market.
Ethereum classic was developed after a group of developers hard forked the Ethereum blockchain network, after the Ethereum community came to a consensus to fork the chain to recover the losses of investors in the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), one of the first major decentralized applications on the Ethereum protocol.
Later, this development was split between several development groups and currently, IOHK, the founding team of $4.4 billion blockchain network Cardano created by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, remains as one of the few development teams that oversee the development of Ethereum Classic.
Just like Ethereum, ETC is also sustained by developers in the open-source development community and the success of ETC does not benefit a single organization. Cryptocurrencies such as Ripple and EOS are overseen by independent and private companies including Ripple Labs and Block.one.
The transparent launch of ETC and the decentralized nature of its development community are what led Coinbase to ultimately integrate ETC ahead of other cryptocurrencies such as XRP and EOS.
The Coinbase team said.
“We have previously announced our intention to support the ERC20 technical standard and Bitcoin forks. We will announce the intention to add specific assets within those categories prior to final engineering integration. This is consistent with our public process for adding new assets,”
