On Friday (3 August 2018), Coinbase announced via its blog that its institutional custody service (“Coinbase Custody”) is “exploring a range of new assets”, including XRP, EOS, XMR, and NEO.
Coinbase Custody, which offically opened for business on 2 July 2018, currently supports only four digial asset types: Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC). However, around 20:36 (UTC) today, it sent out the following tweet:
Coinbase Custody is exploring the addition of many existing and forthcoming crypto assets for storage only, and will be working to add them as quickly and safely as possible. At this time, we have not yet considered these assets for trading.
— Coinbase Custody (@CoinbaseCustody) August 3, 2018
The announcement on Coinbase’s Medium blog provided more details.
A list of 34 cryptocurencies, including XRP, EOS, and NEO, were being considered:
The announcement was careful to stress that Coinbase had “not yet considered these assets for trading.” And that
Asset additions to Coinbase Custody have no bearing on whether they will be added to other Coinbase products.
However, this news is still quite significant for the crypto space since there is now a greater chance that one or more of these cryptocurrencies will receive custodial support from Coinbase in the future, which would definitely be good news for those cryptocurrencies. Why? Because some/many institutional investors (such as crypto asset managers or crypto hedge funds) are reluctant to invest in cryptocurrencies that do not have adequate institutional custody support.
