On Friday (13 July 2018), following Coinbase’s announcement that it was considering adding several new cryptoassets to its platform, CNBC’s Fast Money decided to analyze each of Coinbase’s five candidate digital assets: Cardano (ADA), Stellar (XLM), Zcash (ZEC), 0x (ZRX), and Basic Attention Token (BAT).

Here is what hedge fund manager Brian Kelly (the founder and CEO of BKCM) thinks about each one:

  • Cardano (ADA): “That is something similar to an Ethereum, if you will. They have a live working network. They have a live roadmap… That’s important; that’s what SEC said what was important so it’s not a security.”
  • Basic Attention Token (BAT): “You use this in the Brave browser. You can have an ad-free experience. You can BAT token to pay for content on the web.”
  • 0x (ZRX): “This is one of the most interesting ones. That is a decentralized exchange protocol, up and running, and in fact, I believe, Coinbase launched a bulletin board exchange type of thing [he is referring to Paradex, which has not launched yet]… they use 0x technology.”
  • Stellar (XLM): “Similar to Ripple [he meant XRP]”
  • Zcash (ZEC): “A privacy token, so you can send stuff back and forth without people knowing. Remember, Gemini has already said they are going to have Zcash on their platform. So, this one is probably the most likely.”

The host, Melissa Lee, then asked Brian Kelly why Coinbase was not considering adding XRP if in fact XRP and Stellar are similar. Here is how Kelly explained XRP’s absence from the list of candidates:

“So, I think probably it has to do with the uncertainty around whether or not it is a security, and I'm not going to opine one way or the other, but there are some lawsuits pending about Ripple [he meant XRP] being a security. So, I think just that uncertainty itself would cause Coinbase to say 'Let's tap the breaks on that one for today!'.”

More importantly, he finished on a bullish note, saying that he wouldn’t be surprised if these five cryptocurrencies go up 20%, 30%, or even 40% over the weekend, and that he was “long on every single one of them”, but the two that he would rate a BUY at this moment are 0x and Zcash, which according to CryptoCompare, at press time, are trading around $0.9771 and $176.19. 

 

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