Coinbase Debuts OTC Trading Desk for Prime Institutional Investors and Opens New Chicago Office

The Coinbase brand is easily one of the biggest companies that the cryptocurrency industry has ever seen. They have big plans coming to benefit themselves and their users, but one of the biggest developments lately is the official launch of their trading desk, targeting institutional investors.

As of November 27^th, according to a post by Cheddar, Coinbase has opened the doors for OTC trading, a process that involves two parties directly, rather than a middleman. Usually, this type of investment is performed with a bank and a client, but Coinbase has modified this trading opportunity for their own platform.

Speaking on this development, Coinbase Head of Sales Christine Sandler said, “We launched our OTC business as a complement to our exchange business because we found a lot of institutions were using OTC as an on-ramp for crypto trading. We felt this was a huge benefit to our clients to actually leverage both our exchange and our OTC business.”

Earlier in November, users on the Coinbase platform were given the ability to trade any applicable asset on the Coinbase Prime listings with Skype, Bloomberg IC, email, or phone. The documentation that expanded on this opportunity noted, “Trades settle seamlessly and instantly, with funds available for immediate withdrawal” and “no possibility of a failed trade and no need to chase down wires and blockchain transfers.”

The service offering is planned to add delayed settlement to their options, which may be added to an existing hedge fund platform called Coinbase Custody. Coinbase Custody also serves exchanges and ICO teams, after launching about four months ago.

Back in May, Bitcoin Exchange Guide wrote about the upcoming launch of OTC block trading and the addition of Coinbase’s new Chicago office. At the time, Coinbase hadn’t announced anything official, but had only recently launched Coinbase Custody, a Coinbase Index Fund, and an Asset Management service at the time. In the month prior, Coinbase had just added support for ERC20 tokens.