Before we begin, lets have a look at the early interest Coinbase had in BAT.

Brendan Eich (BAT Founder) is the developer of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla Firefox. BAT has gotten many Twitter mentions dating back to early 2017 from Brian Armstrong (Coinbase CEO) about adding BAT to Coinbase, including partnerships.

The strange part is how Brian Armstrong tweets this the day after the BAT ICO that took place on May 29th, 2017. There were many “good idea” ICO’s before BAT so what makes BAT so special? Considering how big Coinbase is, they wouldn’t intentionally say this the day after and ICO ended unless there was something beforehand with the risk that the ICO doesn’t deliver or is a scam. Saying BAT is “exactly the sort of token” they want on Coinbase the day after an ICO is putting a lot on the line.

Coinbase created a process after the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fiasco for adding new assets to Coinbase and GDAX (Now Coinbase Pro). Step 1 and 2 are done internally so we wouldn’t have public knowledge of that.

Here is a timeline of important events to back up why Coinbase could be adding BAT very soon:

(~5 months ago) March 28, 2018: Announcement to support ERC20 tokens in coming months

The key phrase here is “in the coming months”. That was about 5 months ago so almost half a year already since the announcement to add tokens.

We’re excited to announce our intention to support the Ethereum ERC20 technical standard for Coinbase in the coming months. This paves the way for supporting ERC20 assets across Coinbase products in the future, though we aren’t announcing support for any specific assets or features at this time. We are announcing this both internally and to the public as consistent with our process for adding new assets. https://blog.coinbase.com/adding-erc20-support-to-coinbase-fe9cba6782b

(~1.5 months ago) July 13, 2018: Coinbase announces adding BAT

Q: What is the status on adding ERC-20 assets?

- We announced our general intention to support ERC20 assets in March. The BAT and ZRX assets are the first specific ERC20-based assets we are exploring for addition to the platform. https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-exploring-cardano-basic-attention-token-stellar-zcash-and-0x-9e44f0eb823f

At this point, the BAT listing was announced 54 days ago. Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the only other coin after Bitcoin Cash (BCH) that we have any reference to for Coinbase’s adding of new assets.

Below is a timeline of Ethereum Classic’s journey to a Coinbase listing:

So Ethereum Classic (ETC) took 56 days to get listed from the initial announcement and we are at 54 days (52 days for the Final Testing announcement). The only thing we are missing is Step 5 of the Coinbase asset process (Final Testing) before we start seeing the allowance of deposits for liquidity and actual trading. Ethereum Classic (ETC) took 5 days from Step 5 (Final Testing) to allowing deposits.

Coinbase has been very interested in Ethereum (ETH)for a very long time now. Toshi (now Coinbase Wallet) was created by Coinbase back in early 2017 and lots of development has been done around Ethereum (ETH). Soon Paradex will allow you to trade ERC20 tokens between wallets. With such interest in Ethereum (ETH) dating back to 2017, it has been almost 2 years since Coinbase has been developing support for ERC20 tokens and BAT is already already announced to be added.

This last part is just my thinking from a trading perspective so don’t take this as trading advice in any way.

Coinbase has a huge unique influence on the market because it allows a lot of traders in the major regions, including the United States, have direct access to purchase coins from their bank accounts.

So….

BAT is definitely on my radar as a trader. Considering how low BAT is on the chain of marketcaps and how big of a gap it is to the other Coinbase listed tokens, the possible return on BAT could be huge.

It is very suspicious that BAT has received such little attention in the Crypto world and the volume has been so low yet, it is to be listed on Coinbase first along with 0x. Coinbase makes profits from people trading on their Coinbase Pro platform and from a business sense, they should list the most popular (and reputable) coins so that traders could speculate on it and generate fees.

As of this post, here are the volumes of the other ERC20 tokens that Coinbase announced across all exchanges:

When it comes to investing (like stocks), you want to buy something before it gains in popularity and the price goes up. BAT is definitely “under the radar”.