Hoping to take advantage of the rapid growth and sudden market interest in Ethereum, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in China, OKCoin, has formally announced that it will begin offering ETH trading pairs beginning on June 1, 2017. This is followed on the heels of the announcement by Huobi, another large Chinese cryptocurrency exchange, that they will also be adding a CNY/ETH pair on May 31st.
While the addition of Ethereum trading to the large China market has been a long awaited event for fans of Ethereum, one of the more interesting aspects of the OKCoin announcement actually concerns BTC. While I do not normally cover announcements, as CryptoYeti is not a news aggregator site, I do highlight the more interesting ones and this particular announcement is interesting for two reasons.
You can read OKCoin’s full announcement below, but besides the huge news this is to the Ethereum community, there is a paragraph near the bottom of the announcement that I thought would be worthy to call attention to.
Given this opportunity, we implore BTC Core developers and relevant Miners to work together and resolve any outstanding technical issues, activate Segwit, and solve BTC’s scaling issues. Our industry and the history of technology offers us many warnings, whether it’s the IE browser or the Nokia mobile phone. No matter how dominant, how much market share you have, if you do not adopt the latest technology and fail to constantly improve on the core user value proposition, time will pass you by. Ultimately, digital asset exchanges around the world can only advocate for the best technology and aim to provide the best trading experience for our clients.
In the words of one Reddit user, it’s as if “OKC calling out BTC Core” on their continued lack of action contributing to the decline of BTC’s market-share.
As I wrote in my Bitcoin Losing its Dominance? post earlier today, Bitcoin has enjoyed a 75% plus market share since, well since it first created the space. Historical exchange charts shows Bitcoin’s dominance from early 2013 when it first broke above $200, eventually peaking at $1,200 that same year, as holding at above 75%, with much of the time spend at 80% or higher, that is until early this year. Since January 2017 Bitcoin’s market share has been rapidly declining, and now stands at only 46%, while Ethereum conversely has increased its market share to nearly 26%.
It seems OKCoin, which has been a strong supporter of BTC, is one of many who are beginning to sit up and take notice and saying enough is enough! Indeed, if Bitcoin Core and the many others responsible (there is plenty of blame to go around) do not get past all this infighting and address the block size issue, they may quickly see their beloved King of cryptocurrencies give up its crown. Ethereum is obviously the next contender for the throne, but there are many others also quickly climbing the ladder.
OKCoins full announcement:
OKCoin is headquartered in Beijing, China, which is 12 hours in front of the EST (New York) time zone. For US users, this means trading of Ethereum should begin around 12:00 AM midnight June 2 New York time. As I post this it is in about 30 minutes, so I am anxiously waiting to see how the markets react, and I am sure many others are too.