Following a recent announcement that it will be adding more cryptocurrencies to its wallet, Luno, one of the largest exchanges in emerging countries, has unveiled Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency, as the latest altcoin that will feature on its wallet in the coming weeks.
According to a statement seen by BusinessDay, Luno which is in over 40 countries including Nigeria, said it has monitored the development of the BCH project and is confident it is the right time to welcome it to its exchange.
Bitcoin Cash is an altcoin version of bitcoin which was created as a result of a hard folk (when a single cryptocurrency splits two) in blockchain technology in August 2017. The hard folk gave birth to Bitcoin Core (BTC) and BCH. Bitcoin owners at the time of the fork ended up with the equivalent BCH amount after the fork. This essentially meant that if a user had 1 Bitcoin before the fork, he or she gets 1 BTC and 1 BCH after the cash.
Luno had expressed support for the fork on-behalf of their customers, although it decided not to offer the option to buy or sell BCH on the platform. The decision however did not deter existing customers from going ahead to store and receive BCH in their wallets.
“We ensured those with Bitcoin had a way to withdraw their BCH balance to a compatible platform,” Luno noted in its statement.
The company said it processed BCH withdrawals for some time and was able to see significant amount of customers activate their BCH wallets.
Customers have over time through different medium and forums complained about the limited cryptocurrency options on the platform. Luno first started with Bitcoin and later added Ethereum in November 2017.
“With our finger on the pulse since then, we’ve witnessed more development to give us the confidence to introduce BCH into the Luno ecosystem. With some of our customers already having this wallet activated, it made sense to extend this to the rest of our customer base. We’re happy to announce all our customers will be able to buy, sell and store BCH on our platform shortly,” the company said.
Luno had recently enabled their users in South Africa to buy Ethereum using the local currency, rand.
