Bitcoin exchange Coinbase, Inc. has added support for Ethereum, allowing customers in 32 countries to buy, sell, send and store ether in their Coinbase accounts.

The announcement follows Coinbase’s first commitment to the Ethereum network in May when it added ether support to its bitcoin trading exchange, a service since rebranded as the Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX).

In addition to being able to buy or sell ether on their accounts, customers can purchase the cryptocurrency directly using the Coinbase Buy Widget, or by using existing Coinbase payment methods including credit card and bank transfer.

Ether purchases have the same limits as bitcoin purchases currently do.

“There has been a lot of activity in Ethereum recently: the largest crowdfunding in history (The DAO), the subsequent attack on The DAO, and a resulting hard fork,” Coinbase said in a blog post. “Ethereum is still in an early and experimental phase, and as it matures will likely evolve to serve a different purpose than Bitcoin.”

“In the meantime, Ethereum is pushing the digital currency ecosystem forward and we are excited to support it as part of our mission to create an open financial system for the world.”

Growing pains

As we wrote when we covered the somewhat dubious attempt by EtherIndex to become the first ether focused exchange traded fund (ETF), the Ethereum distributed exchange only launched in July 2015 and ether, the currency exchanged on the network, has had mixed fortunes, including recently the theft of $55 million worth of the currency from the Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization, this despite ether being marketed as being a safer alternative to bitcoin.

But a funny thing happened on the way not to the forum but indeed in the space of the last week: Ethereum executed a hard fork, which according to SiliconANGLE’s Kyt Dodson involved a modification to the codebase that changed how blocks are processed in such a way that blocks on the previous codebase cannot be processed, at block number 1920000.

Unlike bitcoin which has had all sorts of issues with consensus decisions, the Ethereum hardfork was supported by 87 percent of ETH holders with 80 percent of the miners voting in favor.

The intent of the fork had one purpose only, and that was to resolve a problem in the system that allowed the theft of $55 million worth of ether, and perhaps more remarkably returned the stolen funds as well.

While there’s still some growing pains ahead for Ethereum the fact that the majority of the community could come to such a strong consensus so quickly to resolve a serious issue at hand shows that it has the potential to go on to bigger and better things.

Image credit: Brian Armstrong/Coinbase