If you’re a Coinbase user, you may have seen some new tokens on your account. The Bitcoin Cash chain split into two different chains back in November. It means that if you held Bitcoin Cash on November 15, you became the lucky owner of Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC. And Coinbase just started handing out Bitcoin SV to its users if you’re involved in the split.
The split happened because Bitcoin Cash developers couldn’t agree on an upgrade. Some developers backed an upgrade to the code called Bitcoin ABC while others defended a more conservative update dubbed Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (Bitcoin SV).
Some miner pools decided to adopt one of those forks while others adopted the other — and it led to a split. Miners all started with the same chain, which means that a wallet address that held 2.7 Bitcoin Cash was credited with 2.7 Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV on November 15.
Shortly after the split, it became clear that Bitcoin ABC had more support than Bitcoin SV. So it quickly became what we now call Bitcoin Cash again (I know, it’s a mess).
If you control your own private keys, you may have sent and received BCH and BSV over the past few months. But if you held your BCH on Coinbase, your BSV were nowhere to be found — that is, until today.
Coinbase doesn’t plan to support BSV trading for now. So you can only withdraw your BSV from your Coinbase account, but you can’t buy additional BSV. BSV are currently worth $63 per coin while BCH are worth $122. The company says that there’s no deadline for withdrawing BSV.
It took Coinbase three months to let you control your own cryptocurrencies. It proves once again that you shouldn’t leave your crypto assets on an exchange. It’s best to control your own wallets using a hardware device or at least a secure software wallet.