Coinbase, one of the leading cryptocurrencies markets in the US has announced that it is expanding its business as it tries to beat competition. The company, which is based in San Francisco has made several announcements, all aimed at supporting the digital currency assets, while at the same time cooperating with regulators.
In doing this, the company, which has been around for around six years, will help in uncovering if come digital assets are securities in addition to finding ways to trade these assets within the legal framework. According to Scott Suh, a Canaccord Genuity research associate, the company is reinventing itself and laying the foundation for supporting tokens from the technical perspective as well as from the regulatory perspective.
Recently the start-up had meeting with officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission as it seeks to get licensed as brokerage and electronic-trading venue. This is according to a report ran by the Wall Street Journal on Friday. A source close to the matter has confirmed that the company is having talks SEC in a bid to get registered. The cryptocurrency company is yet to comment on the matter.
By having a license for brokerage, the company will be in a position to support more coin business, which at the same time remaining in compliance with securities regulation. According to Jerry Brito, the executive director at Coin Center, a Washington-based digital currency advocacy group, for the start-up to start trading in securities, it needs to become a broker-dealer.
Meanwhile Coinbase is working on building its technical capacity to handle new digital assets, many of which will be considered as securities by SEC. Last week, the start-up announced that in the coming months, it intends to start allowing customers to withdraw bitcoin, which is the biggest cryptocurrency by market size. This comes after another announcement that the company made the previous week in which it said it intends to start supporting the Ethereum ERC20 technical standard. Ethereum is used by many tokens launched the famous initial coin offering process. In both the announcement, the company said that it is not planning to add any more assets to the platform.
