It is interesting to see all the people up in arms here. Everyone here is assuming that no one knew that Coinbase was going to add Bitcoin Cash. That simply isn't true.
For the last two months, they have said they plan to add it. In fact, Bitcoin Cash was about 280 dollars and it was common knowledge Coinbase was going to support it. You, the employees, and everyone else could have loaded up if you wanted to.
Lastly, there is no real incentive for employees to load up on BCH to make a quick buck. In the first seconds of trading a massive sell wall of 12,000 orders emerged and that would drive the price down dramatically.
I was watching the sell wall, and it built up to 12,000 slowly over the period of at least 45 minutes, probably because the ticker price said $8499 on Coinbase.
Where this all starts to smell a little funny is how badly and strangely this was rolled out, how they allowed some trades, and how the price crept up 50-100% before the announcement. Someone said they accidentally released some bitcoin cash UI feature that tipped people off a few days ago. More incompetence.
"...we do not believe it is safe to allow support for Bitcoin Gold at this time. If the blockchain proves to be secure and valuable, GDAX may choose to support it and at that point credit your account with an amount of Bitcoin Gold equal to your Bitcoin (BTC) balance at the time of the fork."
I made a killing on the BCH speculation because if you looked at the coinbase API, you could clearly see they had BCH support already implemented even before the announcement!
Even back in August, specifying BCH-USD on certain api calls would return a 200 and a blank api response, rather than a 400 and {'message': 'not a valid product_id'}.
For the last two months, they have said they plan to add it. In fact, Bitcoin Cash was about 280 dollars and it was common knowledge Coinbase was going to support it. You, the employees, and everyone else could have loaded up if you wanted to.
Lastly, there is no real incentive for employees to load up on BCH to make a quick buck. In the first seconds of trading a massive sell wall of 12,000 orders emerged and that would drive the price down dramatically.