With the Bitcoin Cash distribution having gone relatively smoothly, the million bitcoin question now is where people can buy and sell their BCH tokens. That may prove slightly more difficult than people would assume. Quite a few exchanges have finished issuing BCH to users yet still are not allowing withdrawals and deposits. This has created a lot of confusion for most users, but it is something they will have to deal with for the time being.
Most Exchanges Still Do Not Allow BCH Deposits and Withdrawals
A lot of people are confused about how one can trade Bitcoin Cash on the exchanges that support it. People who have been paying attention to these developments will be aware that many platforms issued BCH according to users’ BTC balances during the time of the fork. One of these exchanges was BTCChina, and it finally completed its token distribution several hours before press time. All user balances have been credited accordingly without any issues.
BTCChina will not trade BCH on the BTCChina platform itself. Instead, the BCH trading markets have been opened on the company’s Blockchain+ platform. Right now, it is possible to exchange Bitcoin Cash against the Chinese Yuan. (Note that the company utilizes the ticker symbol BCC).
BTCChina is not the only exchange not allowing Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals for the time being. Yunbi, another Chinese exchange, has taken a similar approach. That is frustrating to some people, since there are plenty of users that want to dump their BCH as quickly as possible. Whether or not that will happen anytime soon remains to be seen. Until exchanges enable deposits and withdrawals, this confusing situation will continue.
As of Thursday morning, perhaps the biggest exchange actively trading Bitcoin Cash without allowing deposits and withdrawals was Bittrex. The company is generating a ton of trading volume for BCH right now, and the price for this token is a lot higher compared with other platforms such as Bitfinex and Kraken. It is unclear why none of those other platforms are following the price on Bittrex, as it is clearly the market leader right now. Users can effectively deposit BCH on Kraken, yet there seems no point in selling it at such low prices.
We saw how high the Bitcoin Cash price can go with relative ease. After all, it surpassed the US$750 mark thanks to some massive price action on the Bittrex exchange. Kraken remained well behind that price for several hours and eventually started to bring down the average price. If that exchange had a lot more volume — which it does not, due to its infrastructure issues — those prices would look very different right now.
All things considered, things are still looking up for Bitcoin Cash. Exchanges wrapping up the distribution of BCH is a big step toward creating an open market. It is now up to individual platforms to enable deposits and withdrawals in the coming days. The Bitcoin Cash network is still fairly slow when it comes to confirmations, and blocks are anywhere from one to three hours apart. Depositing funds could take several hours at best.
