In mid-December, Coinbase indicated a need for expanding its office space by more than six times in order to keep up with increased demand, according to Hacker Noon. Perhaps the lack of infrastructure helped to explain why Coinbase added bitcoin cash to its limited offerings; the addition would help with liquidity and serve to pull back bitcoin's early bull run.
It's useful to spend a bit more time looking at bitcoin cash to get a sense of how ripple might eventually come to Coinbase. Coinbase would not wish to alert investors of its plans to add bitcoin cash to the platform, as investors would then buy up as much cheap bitcoin cash as they could before the launch, in the hopes that it would gain upon being added to Coinbase.
The same situation would likely be true for ripple; investors holding ripple when it's added to Coinbase would likely gain a good deal of money very quickly. Coinbase also has to deal with the fact that, for the time being, it is one of the most popular exchanges for U.S. customers. When ripple was rallying into the new year, Coinbase faced a cash flow shortage as users rushed to get rid of their bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum holdings in order to buy up XRP. The cash flow problem, exacerbated by issues with transaction completion, does not reflect well on Coinbase from a publicity standpoint. If there's a way that they can better control these issues when they roll out ripple trading, it's a safe bet they will.
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