This week, San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase announced that KNC, the native asset of the Kyber Network liquidity aggregator project, would be supported on its advanced trading platform, Coinbase Pro, starting on February 24th.
The news immediately sent a wave of excitement through the Kyber community, as Coinbase is one of the largest and most reputable crypto brands in the world and can thus further legitimize and help introduce the DeFi liquidity provider to new audiences.
“The Kyber protocol aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in any decentralized application,” Coinbase explained.
The exchange has stayed mum for now on if or when KNC will be listed on Coinbase.com and its retail-facing mobile apps, but considering the trajectories the company has taken with other tokens in recent months, it seems likely that such support is indeed on the horizon.
Now the question on many cryptoeconomy stakeholders’ minds is which projects might enjoy the fabled “Coinbase Bump” next?
What We Know
Here, it’s worth noting that Coinbase’s various arms will always undoubtedly be disparate in their crypto offerings. For instance, Coinbase Custody, the exchange’s enterprise unit, will likely support a wider array of tokens than Coinbase.com in perpetuity.
Even still, the exchange has openly revealed the projects it has generally considered for listing on several occasions, and the tokens that Coinbase lists on one arm, like Coinbase Pro, can signal the interest it has in doing so on another, like Coinbase.com.
Tokens of Interest
Coinbase has made good on listing more than a handful of the tokens it has publicly admitted to being interested in. Though there are plenty of other projects that may still be on the slate.
Back in the fall of 2018, the U.S. exchange made waves when it revealed it was considering adding support for 31 new cryptocurrencies.
Some of those projects have since hit the exchange’s books, including XRP, EOS, Tezos (XTZ), Stellar (XLM), Augur (REP), Chainlink (LINK), and the Dai stablecoin.
However, other notable projects from that lot that Coinbase could still be considering to further support in the foreseeable include the following:
- Cardano (ADA)
- Enjin (ENJ)
- Golem Network (GNT)
- Decentraland (MANA)
- Maker (MKR)
- Status (SNT)
One year later, Coinbase confirmed it was considering adding further support for another batch of tokens, this time around being Algorand, Cosmos, Dash, Decred, Ontology, Waves, and two Binance Launchpad projects in Harmony and the Matic Network.
“Over time we expect our customers around the world will have access through Coinbase to at least 90% of the aggregate market cap of all digital assets in circulation,” the exchange said in a blog post at the time.
Since then, the exchange has added Cosmos’s native ATOM token to both Coinbase Pro and Coinbase.com. Furthermore, in October 2019 the company also revealed that Coinbase Custody planned to support the Orchid (OXT), Solana (SOL), and Telegram Open Network (GRM) projects.
Orchid was listed across all Coinbase’s arms in December 2019, suggesting the same trajectory might be in store for SOL and GRM.
Coinbase Now a Principal Member of Visa
In other Coinbase news, the exchange announced on February 19th that Visa had approved the unicorn startup as a principal member, making it the first crypto-native company to have earned such approval from the traditional payments powerhouse.
“Visa membership will enable us to further improve the customer experience, making it easier to spend cryptocurrency in everyday situations,” noted Coinbase, which launched their Coinbase Card debit card offering in 2019.
Thus as Coinbase continues to expand its token offerings, Coinbase Card users should find it increasingly easy to spend a variety of cryptocurrencies in mainstream contexts.
