Coinbase Moves Into Utility Phase, Experiences 11-Month High in Trading Volume Growth

Coinbase, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States and an important player in the crypto market, continues to expand its services and products. The exchange has recently announced that they will be expanding into 11 new countries. The main intention is to bring new use cases into virtual currencies.

Coinbase Offers Services To 11 New Countries

In a recent blog post uploaded by Coinbase, they launched crypto-to-crypto conversions and trading in 11 new countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Philippines, Australia, and South Korea. This increases the reach to 53 new countries and expanding Coinbase’s reach to four continents.

Coinbase claims that direct trading between cryptos has been increasing over time and that now is the norm. At the same time, they show that crypto-to-crypto trading has surpassed fiat-to-crypto trading around the world.

The platform wrote in its blog post that the virtual currency market is currently moving into the utility phase. They explain that this utility phase can be lending or micropayments, among other applications that “no one has even thought of yet.” Back in February, then-Vice President for international expansion Dan Romero explained to Diar that the popular exchange wanted to build an ecosystem to move away from the narrative of crypto only being a speculative investment.

Although the exchange mentioned that they want to move to a “utility phase,” the digital currencies that the platform is currently offering do not seem very useful for other platforms or use cases more than speculation. Moreover, just a third of the countries that Coinbase supports allow users to purchase virtual currencies with fiat.

The platform seems to be trying to move away from the trading side, but this is something very difficult to do. Indeed, it is so difficult that even after launching other products and services for institutional investors, they remain highly reliant on trading volumes from their trading platform.

Trading volume in the platform has reached the largest trading volume since December 2018. In March, the trading volume for the exchange was the lowest in more than 8 months. The platform will have to improve its strategy if it wants to remain competitive in a highly challenging crypto market and ecosystem.

In the last 24 hours, Coinbase Pro registered a trading volume of $185 million, according to CoinMarketCap. This makes the exchange the 39th largest in the market.