The price of ethereum classic, the cryptocurrency that was forked off the ethereum blockchain in July 2016, surged by 25 percent on Tuesday, following the news that it is being added to Coinbase's trading options.

The U.S. cryptocurrency exchange announced on Tuesday morning in a blog post that it is has started the engineering work to integrate ethereum classic with its platform and expects the service to be live in the "coming months."

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that the price of ethereum classic started to jump around 01:30 UTC on Tuesday, after Coinbase first tweeted out the announcement at 01:18. It later surged as high as $16.15 at around 2:00 UTC, reflecting a 25 percent gain in just half an hour.

The news comes soon after Coinbase reiterated in March that it had not made any decisions on adding new assets, following a similar note made in January.

"The internal asset selection committee has been assessing assets using our Digital Asset Framework, but no assets have been recommended to the Coinbase executive team," the company said at the time. Coinbase has not yet explained what has led to the change of the thinking of its asset selection committee that led to the support for ethereum classic.

Also notably, the decision to add ethereum classic arrives after some in the industry had questioned Coinbase's asset selection process as "random, if not altogether dubious."

As previously reported by CoinDesk, the reason for such comments partially stemmed from the fact that Coinbase added support for bitcoin cash, just months after the cryptocurrency was created out of a hard fork from the bitcoin blockchain. However, at that time, the firm had not embraced ethereum classic a year after the cryptocurrency was hard forked off the ethereum network.

Coinbase image via Shutterstock