Coinbase is arguably the most active and widely known cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, and up until last week, it conducted and dealt with exchanges of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin with fiat currencies in 32 countries, with additional Bitcoin transactions and storage in 190 nations around the world. It has been up and running since 2012.

On the other hand, Ripple is one of the world’s most prominent digital assets. It has a market cap, as of the moment of writing this piece, of $13,553,852,343 (or $13.5 billion,) and it is currently trading at $0.327660, up 7.75 % in the last 24 hours. There are 41.365.634.610 XRP in total supply, and the trading volume in the last day was $1,029,807,031. It is one of the healthiest and most successful crypto projects in the industry.

Bound to Happen at Some Point

As you can imagine, it makes all the sense in the world that Coinbase includes Ripple (XRP) in its catalog of options available to buy and sell the third ranked cryptocurrency by market cap. Finally, the people’s petitions will be fulfilled, as the exchange will launch support for XRP starting this week.

The announcement came on Monday, February 25th. However, the exchange of XRP will only be available in Coinbase Pro, its professional trading platform, and in the “transfer-only” mode, which means that traders will only be able to deposit XRP at first. The firm is planning to make other trading services available, although timelines are not yet known.

The plan is for users of Coinbase pro in the United States (except for the state of New York,) the United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and some countries in the European Union to be able to access XRP. The support for other places and jurisdiction has a chance to be added in the not so distant future.

Eventual Support for Non-Professional Users

With all the details known about the support for professional users, people are now expecting more information about when the opportunity to buy and sell XRP will be available for non-professional users. And whilst no exact date has been published, Coinbase usually launch support for its other platforms (coinbase.com, as well as its Android and iOS apps) only a few weeks after doing it in Coinbase Pro.

“The [XRP] ledger is powered by a network of peer-to-peer servers. All accounts on this network can send or receive XRP to/from each other, while XRP can be used to send underlying fiat currencies between two parties,” according to a blog post by the company.

A Bridge Currency

“In this way, XRP can function as a bridge currency in transactions involving different currencies such as US dollars, Japanese yen, Euros, Francs, and others in use on the XRP network,” it also stated.

Much to the community’s approval, Coinbase insiders are reportedly “prepared to support the asset however it’s classified by regulators,” regarding Ripple’s possible classification as a security.

By Andres Chavez

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