Crypto traders will be pleased to hear that Coinbase – one of the largest digital exchanges in the U.S. – is unveiling two new perks: instant cryptocurrency purchases, and higher daily limits for both deposits and trading. Prior to the announcement, customers of Coinbase were stuck dealing with limits on their account holdings, while purchases often took as long as five days to complete.
Let’s Tell the Country
The company wrote in a blog post:
“When someone makes the decision to sign up, they don’t want to wait days before they can start buying cryptocurrency. While we do support instant transfers via wire transfer and debit cards, purchases via direct debits from your bank account can take days to appear. With this update, customers will receive an immediate credit for the funds being sent from their bank account. They can then buy and sell crypto to and from their USD wallet right away but cannot send their funds off the Coinbase platform until the funds coming from their banks have settled.”
In addition, customers were once limited to weekly spending amounts of $25,000. That figure has since become the daily limit, which means customers could now purchase close to $200,000 per week if they wanted.
The company has released a statement, explaining:
“We are also increasing limits for most of our U.S. customers. Until now, the maximum allowable purchase was $25,000 weekly. For verified customers, the limit will now be $25,000 daily, a 7x increase over our prior limits, and once your funds are transferred to Coinbase, there are no longer any limits to how much you can buy or sell at a time.”
Someone’s Been Busy, Lately
Coinbase has been one of the most active digital currency exchanges as of late. The venture recently announced that Ethereum Classic – a coin that resulted from an Ethereum hard fork in 2016 after roughly $3.6 million in ether tokens were stolen by hackers – was being added to its trading platform. This caused a subsequent price hike of nearly 30 percent for the currency. Furthermore, representatives also state that they are considering the addition of five more coins.
Lastly, decentralized cryptocurrency startup dYdX is launching new tokens designed to “short Ethereum” and offer crypto traders exposure to something that founder Antonio Juliano considers “more diverse.” The venture’s efforts are being funded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
Juliano commented:
“The main use for cryptocurrency so far has been trading and speculation – buying and holding. That’s not how sophisticated institutions trade. The derivatives market is usually an order of magnitude bigger than the spot trading or buy/sell market. The cryptocurrency market is probably on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion in volume, so you’d expect the derivates market would be 10x bigger. I think there’s a really big opportunity there.”
Reading Between the Lines
Coinbase’s new perks come with some fine print. Only verified users will be able to take advantage of the new features, while debit cards will experience lowered limits of approximately $7,500 a week. If users want to deposit more, they will need to do so through bank transfers.
Coinbase explained in its blog that users who have not yet completed the verification process “will be required to do so before having access to instant purchases, new trading limits and the ability to withdraw or send coins off-platform.”
In the U.K., customers can also look forward to making deposits in pound sterling through the company’s partnership with Faster Payments. Users can also look forward to lower fees, and less-restrictive limitations that allow transactions of up to 250,000 pounds.
Conclusion
While Coinbase has yet to say when, exactly, these new perks will be available, they say users can expect them sometime next month.
