By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
Crypto exchange Coinbase is actively working on expanding its services. Now its customers receive an opportunity to buy cryptos with the British Pound.
One of the world’s major cryptocurrency trading platforms Coinbase is constantly trying to enhance its customers experience via offering them new opportunities and taking care about their needs.
The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency giant Coinbase has its division in the United Kingdom and now, as it has been revealed, its customers in the UK have an opportunity to purchase digital assets with the British Pound.
Such a move is very important for the platform’s users from the UK. Earlier, if they wanted to pay for their crypto assets with fiat funds on Coinbase, they needed to keep them in euros. Transactions with pound sterling were not allowed.
As a result, for British customers it took several days to buy Bitcoin or any other crypto currency on Coinbase. Moreover, it could lead to additional expenses for paying foreign exchange fees. But now, it will be possible to conduct same-day payments and withdrawals without carrying out any exchange operations.
Zeeshan Feroz, the CEO of Coinbase UK, explained their new initiative the following way:
“Customers will now be able to deposit and withdraw pound sterling and use it to directly buy and sell cryptocurrency – for the first time. Customers will not only benefit from increased speed, but reduced cost as well. By no longer having to convert funds from GBP to euros and vice versa to add and remove funds, there will be no more exchange rates.”
As banks in the UK are still quite conservative about cryptos, it is a good chance for Coinbase to get closer to domestic banking system. Coinbase’s support for British pounds can also result in a higher volume of cryptocurrency transactions in the country.
According to the company’s statement, they are going to offer new trading pairs with GBP like GBP-Bitcoin and GBP-Ethereum in the nearest weeks. These pairs are used by traders as a tool to make bets on currency movements in foreign exchange markets and the company really hopes to see the growing popularity of their new offerings in the community of professional traders.
But this new initiative is not the only one that has been announced by Coinbase over the recent months. In July, Coinbase reveated its plans to expand the number of digital assets that could be available for its customers. Now the company is considering the following 5 digital assets to be added: Cardano, Basic Attention Token, 0x, Stellar Lumens, and Zcash. Due to some regulatory uncertainty, it is believed that the company will make these tokens available first for its clients in the UK and Europe.
Speaking about the company’s legal status, it is necessary to mention that at the current moment it is on its way to become a licensed broker-dealer in the U.S. With a view to work on the issue of legitimization of crypto assets, it is forming a compliance team. Just recently, Coinbase has appointed the first-ever Crypto Compliance Chief.