Coinbase, the San Francisco based Bitcoin platform, which sells the most Bitcoin to users in the United States (and most of the world, outside of exchanges and China), have gone on the record to state that they will be adding Ether to their main platform by the end of this month. Coinbase makes it easy to buy Bitcoin and soon Ether will have an easy Fiat-Ether on-ramp. Expect the price to climb, as money can more easily enter the Ethereum space.
Coinbase, recently rebranded as GDAX (Global Digital Asset Exchange), has gained confidence in the new, yet quickly growing network Ethereum. Ethereum has been lauded for it's security, and Coinbase strongly believes in the networks future as a strong alternative and partner to Bitcoin. They have already added Ether exchanging on GDAX.com, where you can already trade Bitcoin, Fiat, and Ether. However, by Summer's end you can also expect the ability to purchase Ether on their main site. This will likely include both the www.coinbase.com website, as well as on their Android and Apple mobile applications.
Coinbase does not consider the DAO's intrusion to affect their decision to move forward with Ethereum, as the security of Ethereum was not compromised- merely a smart contract, which went by the name "The Dao", was coded improperly over the chain. “While the DAO was compromised, that is very different from the security of Ethereum’s blockchain.” -Chris Berniske, Coinbase
Ether makes it easy to purchase Steem, as it transfers with a 15 second (and soon to be much quicker) blocktime, as compared to Bitcoin's 15 minutes. With Coinbase's integration of easy Ether purchases, picking some up has never been easier. This is also considering that Coinbase now also allows you to instantly buy Bitcoin (and soon Ether) with a credit card and paypal, as well as bank account.
This is very big news for ETH, coinbase continues to add serious legitimacy to the ETH market. Hopefully Hard fork goes down with few issues at this point.
Indeed. Coinbase's support is huge- I totally agree with you. I'm sure that the team has been mostly mum about the development because they're working around the clock to make this fork go smoothly. After the fork, Ethereum is going to get some serious movement up, I believe.
The jump today in price was directly related to this.
Do you think the 3 to 5 jump was because of this?