- London Block Exchange on Wednesday announced it would support two more cryptocurrencies: bitcoin cash and ethereum classic.
- Bitcoin cash rose 8% on the news, while ethereum classic was up just under 1%.
- Follow the price of bitcoin cash in real-time here.
Bitcoin cash was up more than 7%, outpacing other major cryptocurrencies, Wednesday morning after London Block Exchange said it would support trading of the fourth-largest cryptocurrency.
"As we open our doors to UK crypto enthusiasts, we're listening and acting on what the community wants - and that's an array of good quality coin options to trade; all backed by a reliable, comprehensive and user-friendly service that they can trust," Benjamin Dives, CEO of the exchange, said in a press release.
The exchange also said it would support Ethereum classic, currently the 15th largest cryptocurrency, which split from the flagship ethereum in July 2015. The cryptocurrency was up 0.8% Wednesday morning.
Bitcoin and ethereum, the two largest coins, were up just over 1% at the time of writing, while Ripple's XRP was up 2%.
There is an upcoming "hard-fork" planned for bitcoin cash on May 15. The software upgrade will result in bitcoin ABC, an acronym for Adjustable Blocksize Cap, and will increase the size of one block on bitcoin cash's blockchain to 32MB, a fourfold increase from the original 8MB and well above bitcoin's 1MB block size. It's set to roll out on May 15, the developers have said.
The fork will also remove the Segwit protocol, short for segregated witness, the process by which the number of transactions in a block can be increased by moving certain signature data from transactions to the end of the block.
Since its inception in August 2017, bitcoin cash has been accused of misleading investors by piggy-backing off the bitcoin name. While the new cryptocurrency includes the history of the original bitcoin's transactions up until the split, the two currencies are unrelated except for their shared history and name. Theoretically, anyone can create a fork from the original bitcoin source code.
Vocal bitcoin cash supporter Roger Ver, who owns bitcoin.com via an LLC registered at a Marriott resort on St. Kitts and refers to the original bitcoin as "bitcoin core," has appeared on numerous internet talk shows, including the conspiracy-theory site InfoWars, to promote bitcoin cash.