A couple of days back, the Coinbase dev team released a statement saying that it was finally ready to provide full support for Ripple’s XRP token on its native trading platform.
This move has been in the books for quite some time now and after careful deliberation, Coinbase recently released the following message on its official website:
“After 10am on February 25, 2019 we will begin accepting inbound transfers of XRP to Coinbase Pro. We will accept deposits for a minimum of 12 hours prior to enabling full trading. Once sufficient supply of XRP is established on the platform, trading on the XRP/USD, XRP/EUR, and XRP/BTC order books will start in phases.”
At the time of writing this article, XRP is currently the world's third largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalization.
Does XRP Really Meet All of Coinbase's Listing Criterion?
Coinbase's overnight endorsement of XRP raises the question whether XRP is “a utility and compliant with local laws?”. This is especially important since the trading platform recently released a blogpost charting out it's new “asset listing process”. As per the post, Coinbase plans on increasing its total number of altcoin offerings by a total of 32 new tokens.
With that being said, the company's KYC/AML team explicitly stated that all of the newly listed assets will have to be fully “compliant with local law”. Not only that, the asset also needs to be in complete harmony with their “Open Financial System” requirement. In this regard, it is worth noting that a digital asset is only compliant if it is “available to everyone and not controlled by a single entity.”
If that wasn't enough, the Coinbase team has also made it clear that all of its offerings need to be issued from a source that is “public, decentralized, and enables trustless consensus”.
With all of this information out there, we should now look at XRP's listing approval and whether it fulfills Coinbase's above stated requirements. If it does, then the assumption becomes that the XRP Ledger is fully decentralized and independent. To this effect, the Coinbase team also released the following statement:
“XRP is the cryptocurrency used by the XRP ledger, which supports international currency exchange and remittances. The ledger is powered by a network of peer-to-peer servers. All accounts on this network can send or receive XRP to/from each other, while XRP can be used to send underlying fiat currencies between two parties.”
More on the Matter
At this point in the article, it is worth pointing out that CoinBase is still “waiting for regulatory approval” from US federal authorities (such as the SEC and FinRA) before it can start operating as a “broker-dealer of securities”.
Thus, the listing of XRP on the Coinbase Pro platform quite explicitly declares the asset to not be a security.
After years of taking a conservative approach, CoinBase finally seems to be accelerating its coin listing efforts and giving its clients what they really want. As a result of its newfound vigour, the firm's 25 million strong customer base now seems to be lauding the exchange’s latest offerings on a variety of different social media channels.
Final Take
Over the past year or so, many new and novel trading platforms have entered the crypto scene— as a result of which, Coinbase's global clout has somewhat reduced. Even this latest move to add 32 new altassets seems to have come a little too late – since many new investors have already found a host of competitive alternatives such as Binance, Kraken.
Last but not least, it is worth noting that Coinbase's listing of XRP yesterday did not result in even a slight rally for the premier token.
