San Francisco bitcoin startup Coinbase has opened what it calls the country's first licensed bitcoin exchange.

"With this launch," reads a blog post from the company, "our goal is to bring increased stability to the bitcoin ecosystem."

Coinbase already offered what amounted to an online bitcoin exchange, a service that let you trade the digital currency for dollars and other fiat currencies. But the new Coinbase Exchange represents a much wider effort to bring added legitimacy to bitcoin, a system that has often operated outside of government regulations. Last week, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss announced a regulated exchange in New York called Gemini.

According to Coinbase, its new exchange is backed by the New York Stock Exchange, and is approved for use in 24 US states, including New York and California. Initially, the exchange will only be available to US users, but Coinbase’s chief executive, Brian Armstrong, says he eventually plans to expand overseas. "Our goal is to become the world’s largest exchange," he told the Wall Street Journal.

Coinbase has long offered a wallet service that lets consumers store their bitcoin, and it provides backend services that allow business to accept the digital currency as payment for products. According to the company, it now operates 2.1 million consumer wallets and it serves almost 40,000 merchants.

Just last week, the startup received $75 million in new funding, the largest funding round so far for a BItcoin company, bringing its total capital raised to $106 million. With its new exchange, the startup will take a 0.25 percent cut of most transactions and waive fees for the first two months.