Coinbase Announces Several Big Changes In the Course of a Week

This week, Coinbase made several announces that represent the continued advancement of one of the most trusted cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Along with announcing that Coinbase Pro would be accepting deposits of XLM, Coinbase executed its first OTC trade from cold storage, and enabled users to directly transfer holdings from Coinbase.com to their wallet application.

XLM Added to Coinbase Pro

Although there is no information regarding when XLM will be listed on Coinbase’s retail platform, Wednesday is the first day that Coinbase Pro would accept deposits of Stellar Lumens. Trading will begin once there is sufficient liquidity, which is expected to take approximately 12 hours. The price of XLM has gone up significantly (~30%) over the last 5 days.

In a blog post released by Coinbase, the missions of Stellar and Coinbase are closely aligned in terms of improving the global flow of money and how easy it is to transfer funds. Coinbase announced that they were considering listing Stellar in December 2018, and have listed XRP, Golem, Dai, and several other cryptocurrencies since then.

OTC from Cold Storage

Also on Wednesday, Coinbase announced the first over-the-counter (OTC) trade they had made directly from cold storage. Offline wallets usually represent inaccessible liquidity, but have now been integrated directly into the OTC desk of Coinbase Pro.

It can take 24 to 48 hours for a withdrawal to be executed, by which time market conditions may have changed and the intended trade is rendered moot. This technical improvement takes away the need to compromise liquidity and security, and brings Coinbase back up to speed with some of its competitors, like Genesis Trading and BitGo, who announced the feature in January of this year.

Smooth Retail to Wallet Transfers

Finally, we have the improvements to the retail app that allow for a seamless transfer between the trading and wallet functions. In Coinbase’s trading application, the private keys are held by Coinbase, which can lead to some security risks. However, the wallet app allows the user to be in possession of their own private keys. Safeguarding your own private keys can be a liability in itself, but for many, it is preferable to allowing the funds to be held in Coinbase’s “honeypot” of funds.

Once the application updates in the next few days, it will take just a few clicks to move crypto from one application to the other and security will significantly improve for users. This all comes on the tail of last month’s controversial news that Coinbase would enable storage of private keys on Apple Cloud or Google Drive, which was seen to be a massive compromise on security.

Continued Improvements by Coinbase

Each of these represents a continued improvement in the level of convenience provided by Coinbase. As they continue to accept more coins and make functionality simpler for the non-technical user, they have the opportunity to bring in two different types of customers.

First, there are the laymen who are interested in crypto, but slightly intimidated by the technical aspects and don’t want to lost their money. These customers will like the simplicity and all-encompassing nature of the improvements.

Then, there are the more advanced traders or institutional investors who would normally go to Binance for altcoins and more complex trading capabilities, but are closer to being satisfied with Coinbase’s coin selection and Coinbase Pro’s functionality.