It has been announced that Coinbase has acquired Paradex for an undisclosed sum. As yet, few details are available, but Coinbase themselves have said:

[Paradex is] a sophisticated and secure relay platform that will allow our customers to trade hundreds of tokens directly from their wallets.

Interestingly, Paradax is a de-centralized exchange, allowing users to freely trade many different tokens in contrast to Coinbase, which is a centralized exchange. While this move could in theory pit the two against each other, in practice it will mean that Coinbase customers will enjoy greater flexibility – eventually.

Speculation had recently been growing that Coinbase were looking to expand beyond the four tokens – Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin – currently available on their platform. But while there have clearly been conversations with the SEC, Paradex will not be immediately available to American customers, showing that the US’ largest crypto exchange still errs on the side of caution when it comes to staying on the right side of the ongoing regulatory uncertainty in the country.

Ongoing Changes

This new acquisition continues Coinbase’s trend of expansion, with recent news showing that they paid $100 million for earn.com. And the announcement of Coinbase Pro will also see GDAX being retired at the end of June this year.

$ZRX Speculation

Since the announcement broke, there has already been widespread speculation on Twitter that the acquisition will cause ZRX to rise dramatically in value, with Paradex being built on the 0x protocol. One Twitter user said:

$ZRX is gonna fucking explode. In case you didnt know @ParadexIO was just acquired by @coinbase, paradex is built on the 0x protocol. This is massive. pic.twitter.com/1SLSs9icnn — Patient Addict (@EthereumAddict) May 23, 2018

And while there can of course only be speculation at this time, the move certainly is huge given the context of Coinbase’s recent expansion, and ZRX’s price has seen a spike of 15% in the last few hours.

What does this mean for Coinbase? Will we see multiple tokens on the exchange with the SEC’s blessing? Will ZRX explode? Let us know your predictions as this news breaks.