Coinbase Exploring Eight New Assets in Bid to Expand Market Access

Major crypto platform Coinbase announced today that it is exploring support for eight new digital assets. The expansion is part of a larger agenda by the exchange to give customers access to 90% of the aggregate market capitalization of all digital assets.

Coinbase announced its plans in an official blog post on Aug. 5. As part of the announcement, Coinbase noted that they may roll out public-facing APIs and show other indications of engineering work during the exploratory phase.

Per the announcement, the exchange is currently exploring support for Algorand (ALGO), Cosmos (ATOM), Dash (DASH), Decred (DCR), Matic (MATIC), Harmony (ONE), Ontology (ONT) and Waves (WAVES).

According to data from Coin360, Dash and Cosmos are currently the 15th and 20th largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, respectively.

The announcement also contains a number of disclaimers, including the stipulations that support for the foregoing assets is not guaranteed in any particular jurisdiction, and that assets not on the list may potentially be listed in the future.

Coinbase global support

Coinbase also said that it intends to ultimately provide support for a minimum of 90% of the aggregate market capitalization of all digital assets in circulation for clients worldwide. This will purportedly be achieved by means of their Digital Asset Framework, which it uses to assess the relevant properties of potential assets such as security and compliance.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Coinbase added support for 50 new jurisdictions in March as well as adding USDC stablecoin trading for 85 countries. In the announcement, Coinbase wrote:

“Stablecoins are beneficial to anyone who trades crypto, but also have the potential to materially improve the lives of people in countries where inflation is eroding wealth. For new customers in countries like Argentina and Uzbekistan, where consumer prices are expected to inflate by 10–20% in 2020, stablecoins like USDC could provide an opportunity to protect against inflation.”