The market responds with an immediate jump in volume and price...

Coinbase has announced via their blog that they will be adding support for Ethereum Classic "in the coming months". Within moments of the announcement, Ethereum Classic experienced a near-instantaneous jump from about $12.50 to around $15 USD at the time of this writing.

With markets remaining somewhat suppressed, the jump is impressive, but still relatively subdued when compared to other announcements of a similar nature. When Coinbase surprised everyone with the unannounced support of Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase, the currency surged to unprecedented levels and experienced huge liquidity problems on Coinbase.

It looks like Coinbase is attempting to avoid a similar fiasco by announcing their support for Ethereum Classic well in advance of any such launch. Interestingly, the current Ethereum is in actuality a fork, spawned due to a huge bug that caused a substantial loss of funds for Ethereum holders prior to the fork. Ethereum Classic is the original blockchain of Ethereum, despite the name change. The proponents of ETC preferred to retain immutability rather than making up for lost funds via forking.

It's an interesting choice to add to the Coinbase repertoire and offers some parallels to Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, two currencies of the same blockchain who have also taken different approaches since their departure from a single blockchain. It will be interesting to see how Coinbase handles the launch of ETC this time around. Their capacity to handle volume has been increased considerably in recent months, partly in preparation for support of ERC20 tokens, but also perhaps in support of an expected return of volume from a broader range of traders.

*This is not professional trading advice - it's just my opinion!

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source:
https://blog.coinbase.com/adding-ethereum-classic-support-to-coinbase-becb9a337e9c

image source:
https://medium.com/@christophershen/ico-on-ethereum-classic-really-75d8a10ab3f1