The last 2 days was, well you know, yet another bear turn in Cryptocurrency. But for people who have joined the cryptocurrency bandwagon in the last 2 months definitely had either sold it off or did Hodl with fear and uncertainty. Adding to this uncertain times is the fact that American or European citizens have to make 2 transactions to either buy or sell the hot Cryptocurrencies, Ripple(XRP), RaiBlocks(XRB) or NEO.

Whether you want to sell off and cash out or buy at the dip, if you are from the US, you have to buy either BTC or ETH on Coinbase/Gdax and transfer it to one of the exchanges like Binance or KuCoin to purchase Ripple or RaiBlocks.

GDAX(Global Digital Asset Exchange) which is the digital exchange run by Coinbase has a framework by which they use to assess whether they can add a certain digital currency to their exchange. According to the framework, the first and foremost important criteria is

"Innovation or Efficiency Gains - New or Improved technology which helps solve a problem, creates a new market, addresses an unmet market need, or creates value for network participants.".

Ripple(XRP)

Ripple addresses a new problem for global banks and payment companies to exchange money across the borders by replacing an older technology SWIFT with XRAPID. The XRP tokens will be used by banks and payment companies to enable faster transactions across the globe. This definitely meets the above requirement for solves a market need and in the process, this creates value for network participants.

The complaint against XRP since a long time is that it’s managed by a single company and so is centralized. Ripple’s CEO today answered this question in the FAQ’s, below is the excerpt.

"Is the XRP Ledger centralized? This is a top misconception with the XRP Ledger. Centralization implies that a single entity controls the Ledger. While Ripple contributes to the open-source code of the XRP Ledger, we don’t own, control, or administer the XRP Ledger. The XRP Ledger is decentralized. If Ripple ceased to exist, the XRP Ledger would continue to exist."

XRP is not like the hundreds of cryptocurrencies masquerading as yet another decentralized & anonymous digital currency, rather it solves a well thought out problem. The dreams of removing the current FIAT system completely we all have is probably not realistic. The banks will continue to exist and solving their problems and helping them overcome the infrastructure issues they will face, should hopefully counter the centralized claims.

RaiBlocks(XRB)

RaiBlocks is the new kid on the block, oh wait, it’s block-lattice. It does some innovation on how the ledger is maintained or updated using the new block-lattice structure and that results in instant transactions and saving tons of energy. Whenever I write about RaiBlocks, I couldn’t help but think about the below video on how faster the transactions are.

Love this visualization of $XRB transactions per second compared to some of the other top currencies pic.twitter.com/95Wo3RkjIc — Zack Shapiro (@ZackShapiro) December 26, 2017

What more, it’s decentralized and solves a new problem of transaction congestion. I am sure GDAX would think that this will fit their framework.

NEO(NEO)

NEO is a platform like Ethereum, but unlike Ethereum, it’s built for the future problems. It aims to solve various problems by providing a platform to enable smart contracts and a way for new companies to build dApps and launch new ICO’s. This does solve problems using Innovation in dApps and is completely decentralized, bet this fits into GDAX’s framework.

CoinBase, apart from making it difficult for users to own innovative digital currencies, is also losing tons of business to the Chinese Exchanges(Note: Not that they are bad, but it’s just bad business). If Bitcoin Cash, a cryptocurrency whose only innovation is an increased block size to Bitcoin is eligible, then I am sure the XRP, XRB and Neo would also fit into their framework.

What do you think? Are there any other innovative currencies you think Coinbase should consider?

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