Coinbase Strengthens Focus Toward Institutional Investors Presenting its ‘Institutional Core Principles’

Coinbase, a leading digital currency exchange headquartered in San Francisco, California, has released its “institutional core principles” which are likely to gain good standing with some more significant institutions entering into the crypto sphere.

Today, we’re sharing a set of core principles that will guide our institutional business. This set of fundamental beliefs will act as our North Star as we design, develop, and operate our institutional suite of products. https://t.co/w7lZvBaLb0

— Coinbase (@coinbase) August 20, 2018

 According to the Medium post, the mission of Coinbase is to “create an open financial system for the world“. Adam White, Vice President and General Manager at Coinbase, wrote:

“We take this mission seriously: it’s the guiding light for every decision we make, and one of the reasons we recently launched a suite of products and services designed specifically for the needs of institutional investors.”

“Today, we’re sharing a set of core principles that will guide our institutional business. This set of fundamental beliefs will act as our North Star as we design, develop, and operate our products. Ultimately, we intend for these core principles to drive us toward our goal of operating the most trusted venue for storing, trading, and interacting with the world of cryptocurrency.”

The first of the principles is operating a fair and orderly market, which means providing protections and active monitoring of market activity to ensure the establishment, operation and ongoing supervision of a healthy market. That can be achieved with the help of Market Operations team modeled on industry best practices to control and monitor market health.

Principle two is to “Protect our customers with institutional-grade infrastructure and processes.” The exchange promises to provide the highest levels of protection to the customers due to institutional-grade cybersecurity, compliance, onboarding processes and operating standards. To protect customer assets, Coinbase will provide geographically distributed storage vaults, guaranteed accessibility to funds and insurance of stored assets, and maintain institutional-grade Markets platform with reliable and deterministic connectivity.

The third principle of enforcing transparent market rules and governance will be conducted by providing market players with a market rulebook tailored to cryptocurrencies. Coinbase will present public trading rules and policies that are fairly applied to all market participants, publish transparent trading fees and incentive programs, clearly communicate market capabilities, prohibit and actively monitor for malicious or deceptive trading practices, follow a documented process for trading halts and the opening and closing of markets, and commit to ongoing independent third-party audits to ensure compliance with applicable regulations and industry standards.

The fourth principle to “Provide fair access to all market participants” is similar to the previous one in that all participants must abide by the same rules. Coinbase will make all market access methods public and documented, which means that distributed market data will be consistent and fair.

Principle five is to “Publicly disclose listing practices and market rules.” This process considers factors such as the security of the technology, governance processes, demand in the market, along with other potential changes that will be announced. To ensure the presence of robust markets, every new asset will be announced in a transparent and consistent way, along with maintaining strong relationships with liquidity providers.

Earlier, Coinbase introduced its suite of institutional products, among which Coinbase Custody service became the first to go live.

Investors’ interest to Coinbase is continually heightened. Recently, Coinbase acquired a digital identity startup Distributed Systems to develop digital identity solutions, which will significantly improve the way users sign up and connect their crypto wallets.

Moreover, the exchange announced the rebranding of their Toshi crypto wallet, believing that this strategic move will not only bring a new name but also open new opportunities for the product aimed to lead the future of the decentralized web making it closer to a wide audience.