Coinbase GBP Support for Deposit/Withdrawals

Coinbase GBP support coming – UK CEO Zeeshan Feroz spoke at the recent CryptoCompare & MJAC’s London Blockchain Summit, where he shared that the company will add support for GBP wire transfers “in the next few weeks.”

Faster and Removing Unnecessary Fees

Currently, Coinbase uses Estonian bank LHV to process payments, but they are all made in euros (EUR). Whenever a user a makes a GBP deposit or withdrawal, Coinbase converts the funds to EUR. Further, if a user withdraws to an account denominated in GBP, they may incur additional fees for foreign currency transactions.

The biggest thing for me is rolling out access to faster payments for UK consumers (…) Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling that out for all customers. UK users will be able to deposit Sterling and withdraw Sterling out into their bank accounts using faster payments. – Zeeshan Feroz

UK Market and Licensing

Coinbase received an e-money license from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) earlier this year by opening an account with Barclays. This let the exchange support GBP payments, and join the Faster Payments Scheme (FPS).

Feroz also pointed out that the UK market is the largest one in Europe. Only a fractional percentage of Bitcoin exchange is currently done in GBP. However, this new service from Coinbase could change that.

At this time Coinbase only supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin, but other cryptocurrencies are coming. When asked about the possibilty of adding new coins to the platform, Feroz referenced the newly-acquired decentralized exchange:

We will start to take a product-specific view in terms of the regulatory profiles of coins and the service they’re providing and if that allows us to extend it beyond the four coins we have. You will see our businesses as they grow, the coins supported will maybe diverge. One example of that is Paradex which today is live in Europe with eight coins. – Zeeshan Feroz

In addition to Coinbase GBP support, last month it was announced they would support ERC-20 tokens. They have also entered the path to offer SEC-regulated crypto securities by acquiring Venovate Marketplace Inc, Keystone Capital Corp, and Digital Wealth LLC.