Coinbase recently announced a new product in their suite, Coinbase Custody, which is a platform aimed at supporting institutions.
They have stated in their press release that the service will launch in early 2018.
In their features page they state: "We plan to offer support for all major digital assets, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, ERC20 Tokens, and more."
Features page detailing multi-cryptoasset and ERC20 Token support
This seems to confirm two things:
Coinbase plans to add more major/popular cryptocurrencies to their current offering.
Possibly hundreds of cryptocurrencies will be available for sale if they plan to offer all ERC20 Tokens.
What is an ERC20 Token?
The difference between Ethereum and Ethreuem based tokens (ERC-20 Tokens)
ERC-20 Tokens are digital assets that operate on the Ethereum blockchain, these assets include cryptocurrencies and value tokens.
You have defitnitely heard about Initial Coin Offerings (ICO’s), since most ICO’s are carried out on the Ethereum blockchain most coins that are distributed use the ERC20 standard.
This means that Coinbase could potentially support coins such as:
- Augur (already coded in, according to rumours)
- Golem (already coded in, according to rumours)
- Aragon
- Status
- Bancor
- Basic Attention Token
This could also mean that if you miss out on an ICO you can easily buy the coin off of Coinbase (once the coins are made tradable) instead of signing up to the more obscure exchanges.
I haven't seen any concrete news regarding other cryptocurrencies but they did mention adding major cryptocurrencies so it is possible that we will see coins like Ripple, Monero and maybe even NEO available in the future.
I would say it is safe to expect to see some ERC20 Tokens on Coinbase in the near future, the news came straight from the horses mouth.
What about Ripple?
There were a lot of rumours about Coinbase planning to add Ripple to their platform, there was even a “leaked prototype” of the Coinbase dashboard with Ripple trading activated going around on Twitter. This post goes more in depth into the leaked Ripple/Coinbase images: Will Ripple ever be as big as Bitcoin since they are partnered with over 100 banks?
Another thing to note is how Coinbase silently added Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to their exchange without any news or announcements, according to my research one possible explanation for Coinbase doing this is to avoid investors buying up Bitcoin Cash (after the announcement) and then selling or “dumping” it as soon as it is added to the platform.
As we all saw, the price of Bitcoin Cash doubled after being added by Coinbase, but if they made everyone aware of their plans beforehand maybe the outcome would have been different.
Even though Coinbase announced that they would not be adding Ripple at the time being that does not mean that it will not be added in the near future, other popular cash based exchanges like BitPanda have already added Ripple as a purchase option (they also added Ripple silently, the same way Coinbase did Bitcoin Cash).
There is a popular saying that goes “buy the rumour, sell the news”, Coinbase may be trying to avoid investors taking advantage of this (and rightly so), so it would not be in their best interests to alert people to the coins they plan to add.
Final thoughts
We can expect to see some ERC-20 tokens in the near future as well as some Top 10 cryptocurrencies but don’t expect Coinbase to reveal anything beforehand, they seem to be very ethical with the way they conduct business and any rumours could cause investors to try and play the market.
I hope you found this post helpful, feel free to check out these useful resources below:
Keep your cryptocurrencies safe and secure with a Ledger hardware wallet.
Buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash and Dash from BitPanda if you live anywhere in Europe.
Buy Bitcoin and Ethereum from anywhere in the world using CEX or Coinmama.
Get your favourite cryptocurrencies/altcoins from Binance cryptocurrency exchange. (Note: You need BTC or ETH to buy altcoins).