We all know that coinbase is one of the largest exchanges for acquiring cryptocurrency. If you’ve been using it for a decent amount of time you may know some of the issues coinbase has.
(wallet maintenance, insider trading, holding trades at important times, etc etc)
But granted, this applies to all centralized exchanges, which are btw the biggest weak spots in the crypto space right now.
As long as we have centralized trading exchanges for cryptos, we have always the threat of a regulation by a government, in the case of coinbase the us.
This may not be influencing the crypto in itself but it will influence the price and adoption immense. And in my opinion, it is just a matter of time that governments start regulating or even crack down on these.
But what other options do we have for fiat -> cryptocurrency?
Ethos, formerly known as bitquence aka bqx. I think this coin/platform has a very serious chance of replacing coinbase, and all other exchanges we have right now. Let’s see why.
Coinbase has been around for about 6 years, and offers 4 cryptocurrencies you can purchase with fiat, which is quite frankly, pathetic. Ethos platform is set to offer global fiat conversion into every single altcoin. That is massive! A single platform offering every single altcoin for every possible form of fiat - USD, Chinese yen, pesos… Coinbase supports around 26 countries and 4 altcoins, see the difference.
Coinbase fees are practically robbery, and the reason they get away with it is because they know there isn’t really any competition. If you’re doing small purchases, 50, 100$ etc, they take a significant portion from you. And if you want to buy an altcoin, enjoy getting fee’d out the arse. A fee for the purchase, another significant fee to withdraw and send to an exchange, and then if you want to cash out another withdrawal fee.
Ethos is slated to have very small fees, akin to that of binance whilst using the bnb coin (basically pennies for big purchases). They will use the ethos coin to pay for the fees, bringing value to the coin which has 277mil max supply. So you’ll likely have to purchase some ethos to use the platform, but if the price per ethos goes super high, you’ll only need to buy fractions of a coin to cover your fees, say .0002 ethos, or whatever, point is fractal purchases are offered.Coinbase customer service is flagrantly awful. In fact their service in general is awful, frequently having downtimes on their exchange, declined or canceled purchases/deposits etc. Sometimes they won’t even let you transfer your own fiat money sitting in coinbase to your own bank account. The only reason they get away with this is lack of other options.
I am not even gonna mention the two person telephone support, which is only based in the US.
Now it’s not fair to say ethos’ service will be better than coinbases, but all things considered I think it’s a safe bet. They are a capable and solid team with good backgrounds. They recently partnered with a global law firm to make sure they are compliant with any current and coming legislation. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s absolutely mandatory (unless you have an extensive internal law team) and I think it’s a testament to how serious these folks are. Not to mention their marketing and platform design is much more appealing than coinbase (I suppose this is subjective, but at the least it’s very evident they have put more effort in this area), akin to IBM vs Apple in the early 70s, coinbase being IBM…Curve ball for ethos, double time.
Ethos is offering, the world’s first, universal coin wallet -> a single wallet to support every coin you own, not to mention it’s using ledger type technology for security, far more secure than coinbases.
This is a currently a big problem/hassle in the cryptosphere, but it gets better for ethos. The coins that are proof of stake, you won’t have to store them in their individual wallets, ethos’ universal wallet supports staking for PoS coins. Amazing!Regarding insider trading, holding trades at important times or just doing a “wallet maintenance” there is nothing really to say any further.
Ethos second curve ball - a cool, futures type, speculative price market. Basically you can bet on the price of a coin for a particular date in the future, and if you are right you get paid. I don’t know the full logistics of it, but it’s a cool idea and one I think speculative traders will gravitate towards.
So basically all things considered, I don’t see how coinbase will still be relevant, unless they have a massive overhaul, and even then I would bank on ethos’roadmap being far ahead coinbases, based on current information out there.
As someone who has had pretty awful customer service with coinbase, I’m hoping ethos can put this dinosaur of a platform out of it’s misery. Coinbases limited services are currently hampering the growth of cryptocurrency, altcoins in particular. I think once the general population has a user friendly interface with 1 click crypto purchase options, we will see this market grow faster than anyone imagined. I’m banking on ethos being that catalyst, and I think you should consider checking them out and possibly investing, this could be a sleeping giant.
At last I wanna say that all Ethos is right now, is frankly a big promise for the future. But after researching the project immensely the last whole month I am confident enough to invest in it now and in fact already did partially already.
This is just my opinion and I am not saying you should buy Ethos because it is quite obviously really risky at that point and has no guaranteed success if there is such a thing.
All I am saying is that you should check the project out and consider a investment yourself, based on your own research.