Coinbase To Add More Digital Assets, New Policy Says

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase published a Medium blog post Wednesday, announcing the exchange was planning to bring in a new process which could lessen the time taken in listing new digital assets which were already compliant with local laws.

The blog post also noted that Coinbase had plans of listing "new assets" like coins, tokens, forks, stablecoin - a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a stable asset - and collectibles, which are cryptographically unique non-fungible digital asset. The new process was being introduced to make the listing of the new assets easier.

"One of our top customer requests is to add support for these new assets, and we have been determining how to do this in a secure and compliant way for those assets meeting our standards," the blog post mentioned.

At present, Coinbase supports bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, ethereum classic, and litecoin.

"Today we’re announcing a new process that will allow us to rapidly list most digital assets that are compliant with the local law, by satisfying listing requests in a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction manner. In practice, this means some new assets listed on our platform may only be available to customers in select jurisdictions for a period of time," the announcement mentioned.

The new process includes a form that the issuers have to submit for listing new assets. The form is aligned and updated regularly with Coinbase's digital asset framework.

Interestingly, the blog post also noted that the exchange may introduce a listing fee — this is common with many other exchanges — in the future, in order to cover legal and operational costs related to evaluating and listing new assets.

The announcement also said the new process would allow Coinbase to “list most assets over time that meet our standards.”

Since the exchange anticipates the process to make new token listings more frequent, those new listings could be announced only once they become available on one of Coinbase’s public products. This basically means the double announcement will be avoided — ‘token X is coming soon’ and ‘token X is now supported’ — and instead a single reveal will be made. Coinbase had announced in July it was looking at adding a number of cryptocurrencies, and some names on its list included Cardano, Basic Attention Token, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x.

Earlier this month, Coinbase CEO Brian Amstrong said at an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt that the tokenized future could see Coinbase host hundreds of tokens within “years” and even potentially “millions” in the future.

With the current listing of only five cryptocurrencies to hosting millions of tokens is a big jump, and it would make the exchange much larger than financial institutions like the New York Stock Exchange, which is actually part of the vision laid out by the Armstrong - to become the NYSE of crypto securities. Also, NYSE is one of the investors in Coinbase.

Meanwhile, considering Coinbase has a history of influencing cryptocurrency prices with its coin support announcements, bitcoin price didn't seem to be much affected with the latest announcement. At 2:39 a.m. EDT Wednesday, one bitcoin was worth $6,448, a 0.28 percent fall in 24 hours, as tracked by CoinMarketCap.