Bitcoin Exchange Added 100,000 Users in a Day as Price Exploded

(Bloomberg) -- The eye-popping surge in bitcoin this week is paying dividends for one of the biggest U.S. online cryptocurrency exchanges.

Coinbase Inc. added more than 100,000 users in the last 24 hours in the wake of the CME Group Inc.’s announcement Tuesday that it plans to introduce bitcoin futures by the end of the year. That’s according to data collected by Alistair Milne, a portfolio manager at the Altana Digital Currency Fund. The number of users of the online wallet function offered by Coinbase has more than doubled since the beginning of the year, according to stats on the company’s website.

As with the more than sevenfold increase in the price of bitcoin to more than $7,000 this year, new customers may be wise to proceed with caution. Coinbase’s GDAX platform drew scrutiny from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last month over the June 21 flash crash that erased most of the value of ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, in a matter of milliseconds.

--With assistance from Carlos Torres

To contact the reporter on this story: Brandon Kochkodin in New York at bkochkodin@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Dave Liedtka, Brendan Walsh

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