Coinbase Adds Support of Ethereum ERC20 Tokens Across All Its Products
On Monday, March 26, popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced the support for Ethereum’s ERC 20 token across the entire range of its products. ERC20 is the abbreviation of “Ethereum Request for Comment 20” which is basically a technical standard used to write smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.
Coinbase notes that the ERC20 has become a popular way for teams to build interoperable assets/contracts. In the official announcement, the exchange wrote: “We’re excited to announce our intention to support the Ethereum ERC20 technical standard for Coinbase in the coming months. This paves the way for supporting ERC20 assets across Coinbase products in the future, though we aren’t announcing support for any specific assets or features at this time.”
As said earlier, the addition of ERC20 will be affected across all range of Coinbase products with one of the most important one’s being the ‘Coinbase Custody’. The Coinbase Custody is majorly used by institutional investors and is a service providing secure storage and financial controls of large holdings. The addition of ERC 20 token support will pave a further path to a more diverse set of cryptocurrency trusts.
While considering the ERC 20 support for GDAX which is Coinbase’s sister exchange, the company has noted that “the GDAX team will wait for additional regulatory clarity before [deciding] which ERC20 assets to support on GDAX.” However, at this stage the ERC 20 will still allow “to enabling the safe recovery customer ERC20 assets inadvertently sent to Coinbase Ethereum addresses.”
Even though Coinbase will support the ERC 20 protocol it will still continue with the company’s old policy that listing of assets on Coinbase will take place only after they being listed on GDAX. Assets on GDAX will further proceed to Coinbase only after the evaluation of their “liquidity, price stability, and other market health metrics.”
This clearly shows the fact that listing of GDAX exchange doesn’t really mean listing on Coinbase and thus GDAX will have more assets that Coinbase platform at given time.
The ERC20 support to the Coinbase Asset Management means that “any asset listed on GDAX will be added to the Coinbase Index on a market capitalization weighted basis.”
Even though Coinbase announced the support for ERC 20 tokens recently it has not significantly reflected by any sort of surge on the crypto indices as most of the cryptocurrencies are seen showing absolutely flat momentum.
This is because even though there is huge demand for addition of new assets on the platform, it might not take any time soon. Coinbase general manager Dan Romero says that the company is currently observing the steps taken by the U.S regulators before making any further move in this direction and aims to have a cautious approach in this matter.
Romeo said: "The reality of the regulatory situation keeps us from going and doing that right away. "When we get to a point that we know which digital currencies and assets are securities, which ones are commodities, money or currency, it would be immensely helpful. If the regulatory environment gets clearer, I think you will see Coinbase adding many new assets to our platform."