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Coinbase is one of the most popular and well-known cryptocurrency exchanges in the world for USD transactions. The move marks a decisive shift away from that former US-centric approach, and could help to enable markets like the UK to become more prominent in the world of crypto.

According to a press release, new digital assets will be listed if they meet Coinbase’s quality criteria (a seven-step process) and are compliant with local laws on a ‘jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction’ approach. The company adds that they’ll be no fee for this to begin with, but this may change in order to offset operational costs as the volume of applications increases.

The upshot is, the exchange will be shifting away from a process where it seeks new assets to add, to one where developer teams can submit their token or coin to be added to Coinbase. However, the new changes mean some assets could only be available to customers outside the US, as a result of local jurisdiction.

Zeeshan Feroz, UK CEO of Coinbase, commented: “Coinbase supports about five assets and clearly the market is much bigger than the five we support.

“We’ve been trying to figure out for a while what the best way is to support more assets in the currency market. We’ve taken a thoughtful and deliberate approach in terms of how we’ve done that in the past, but what we’re trying to do is upscale that.”

Coinbase currently supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin, and in recent months has been exploring the addition of new assets including Cardano, Basic Attention Token, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x.

“However, there are now thousands of digital assets of all types, including coins, tokens, forks, stablecoins, and collectibles,” read Coinbase’s blog post announcement. “One of our top customer requests is to add support for these new assets, and we have been determining how to do this in a secure and compliant way for those assets meeting our standards.”

Because Coinbase expects asset listings to become more frequent, it says it will announce new additions “only at our near the time of public launch” but ensures it will allow enough time for “sufficient liquidity on our exchange and an orderly market bootup process”.

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