Coinbase Announces ERC-20 Support

CoinOn Monday, Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S., announced that it will be supporting ERC-20 tokens on its platform in the coming months.

In a blog post, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency trading giant announced its intention to add ERC-20 support to its exchange, effectively going against its statements in January. A month before that, the addition of Bitcoin Cash to Coinbase’s platform sparked a massive wave of controversy due to allegations of insider trading.

As a result, Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong released a public statement denying allegations that neither Coinbase nor its sister exchange GDAX would be adding more cryptocurrencies to its platform, including the third largest digital currency, Ripple.

“As of the date of this statement, we have made no decision to add additional assets to either GDAX or Coinbase. Any statement to the contrary is untrue and not authorized by the company.”

Coinbase Optimistic About the Ethereum Standard

“We’re excited to announce our intention to support the Ethereum ERC20 technical standard for Coinbase in the coming months.”

According to Coinbase, the addition of ERC20 support to their platform “paves the way” for the introduction of ERC20 tokens to the Coinbase exchange in the near future.

The statement also mentioned that they will be adding the ERC20 assets to the GDAX exchange first before considering them for the Coinbase platform itself.

“Coinbase will only list assets after they are listed on GDAX. After evaluating factors such as liquidity, price stability, and other market health metrics, we may choose to add any ERC20 asset added to GDAX to the Coinbase platform. It’s also worth repeating that GDAX will likely have more assets listed on the platform than the Coinbase platform, i.e. listing on GDAX does not guarantee listing on Coinbase.”

About ERC-20

ERC20 is essentially the standard that is adhered by tokens that are built upon the Ethereum network and smart contracts. In other words, it is an interface that any developer who wishes to write a smart contract or create a token on the Ethereum network must follow. Following the cryptocurrency boom in late 2017, ERC20 assets have become a popular way for developers to conveniently build interoperable contracts, which gave rise to a plethora of decentralized applications, or dApps for short.

Nonetheless, Coinbase’s announcement did not seem to have any visible effect on the cryptocurrency market, which has been going downhill ever since the January/February crash. In the last 24 hours itself, the cryptocurrency market shed close to $20 billion in valuation to drop past the $300 billion mark. Even the price of Ethereum dipped further below the $500 mark to reach a low of $445, according to data from CoinMarketCap.