Finally Ripple’s XRP Is Available for Trading on Coinbase Pro, Price Shoots

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by Bhushan Akolkar · 4 min read
Finally Ripple’s XRP Is Available for Trading on Coinbase Pro, Price Shoots
Photo: The Coinbase Blog

Truly great news come from Coinbase, which, to the joy of large XRP community, decided to add XRP to its professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro.

Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has finally decided to list XRP token on its professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro. The announcement came on Monday, February 25, and is likely to boost the liquidity of XRP by manifold times. Soon after the announcement, the price of XRP shot by over 10%. However, at the press time, XRP is trading at $0.32 surging 5.32%, with a market cap of $13.2 billion.

The official press release states:

“After 10 am PT on February 25, 2019, we will begin accepting inbound transfers of XRP to Coinbase Pro. We will accept deposits for a minimum of 12 hours prior to enabling full trading. Please note that inbound transfers require the specification of an XRP destination tag.”

Note that XRP will only be available on the “Pro” platform and not on Coinbase.com or its mobile app. Furthermore, as per the press release, the listing will happen in four different stages.

  • The first stage is the “Transfer Only” stage. It means that in the first 12 hours starting 10 am Feb. 25, customers can transfer their XRP tokens to the Coinbase Pro account. However, in this stage, customers can’t place any orders.
  • The second stage is “Post-Only” wherein customers can post limit orders without any available matches.
  • The third stage is “Limit Only” wherein the placed orders will start matching but customers will be unavailable to submit market orders.
  • The final stage is “Full Trading” where all services will be available like limit, market, and stop orders.

XRP Availability on Coinbase Across Countries

The official announcement notes that the XRP/fiat pairs will be available across different countries. This includes the U.S. (except NY) UK, supported European Union member nations, Canada, Singapore, and Australia. The company also plans to add other jurisdictions in the other stage.

Commenting on this news, Mati Greenspan, eToro analyst states:

“It’s great to see more platforms adopting XRP. There’s a lot of excitement around this unique digital asset and this latest update will make it significantly more accessible.”

As we all know, XRP is a digital currency by Ripple tied to its blockchain ledger. XRP facilitates instant cross-border payments across the globe with trade-settlement times as low as 0.04 seconds. Also, leveraging the blockchain technology reduces the costs of transfer considerably in comparison to the traditional systems like SWIFT.

The XRP transfer happens between two, at a given point, through the peer-to-peer servers. Several financial payment companies have started using XRP to send underlying fiat currencies between two parties. Thus XRP acts like a bridge between two currencies like US dollars, Japanese yen, Euros, Francs, and others in use on the XRP network.

Coinbase Not Waiting for the Regulatory Approval

The latest decision from Coinbase shows that it is not willing to wait any further on the regulatory decision of whether XRP is security. There have been several reports in the past that the U.S. SEC can like make a crackdown on XRP under the securities laws.

However, Coinbase also has some safe cards in its basket at the moment. Last year, the exchange got a broker-dealer license which could give it a possible regulatory cover from the SEC. With foreign exchanges like Binance increasing their dominance in the global crypto market, the addition of XRP by Coinbase was a smart strategic decision.

XRP As a Security

As stated earlier, the issues of XRP being security is hovering over since long. Over the last year, Ripple has faced multiple class-action lawsuits in Northern California’s San Mateo Superior Court. This has made Coinbase and other trading platforms skeptical as XRP classification as securities would impact trade and liquidity in the future.

Furthermore, XRP’s classification as securities could lead to the exchange incurring large legal costs. Jake Chervinsky, a lawyer at Kobre & Kim notes that the latest decision by Coinbase to list XRP is because the exchange thinks that the benefits would outweigh the future legal costs.

*To learn more about XRP coin, Ripple company, and their innovative solutions, please check out our awesome guide.

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