Coinbase, the leading US cryptocurrency trading platform, says its suite of new products can unleash a crush of institutional investors into the cryptocurrency market.
The cryptocurrency exchange says Coinbase Custody, Coinbase Markets, The Coinbase Institutional Coverage Group and Coinbase Prime will be the catalysts that open the doors.
“We think this can unlock $10 billion of institutional investor money sitting on the sideline,” Adam White, Coinbase’s vice president and general manager, told CNBC’s Kate Roonie. “We’re seeing a rapid increase in attention awareness and adoption in the cryptocurrency market.”
Here’s a look at those four products and how they can change the game for institutional investors.
Coinbase Custody
Coinbase is partnering with SEC-regulated broker-dealers to give investors with big money confidence that they can safely store their funds in “the most secure crypto storage solution available.”
Coinbase says the technology merges “Coinbase’s cryptocurrency security excellence with third-party auditing and financial reporting validation that operates at the high standard of an SEC-regulated, custodial broker-dealer.”
Coinbase Markets
This is the company’s new digital marketplace, operated out of a new office in Chicago. Coinbase Markets will offer a centralized pool of liquidity across all of the company’s products in order to create tighter markets, deeper liquidity and increased certainty of execution.
Coinbase Institutional Coverage Group
The focus of this product is centered on serving the needs of institutional clients by offering sales, sales trading, research, marketing operations and client services support. Coinbase has brought in talent from Morgan Stanley, the SEC and CFTC in an effort to guide new clients on how to invest in the cryptocurrency market.
Coinbase Prime
Coinbase is creating a suite of tools and services that will enable “lending and margin financing products to qualified clients, high touch and low touch execution services like over-the-counter (OTC) trading and algorithmic orders, and new market data and research products.” The company is also introducing multi-user permissions and whitelisted withdrawal addresses.
San Francisco-based Coinbase is heavily focused on building up the entire crypto economy. Founded in 2012, Coinbase has been able to optimize its first-mover advantage. It now has over 20 million accounts, nearly as many as Fidelity Investments and twice as many as Charles Schwab. It recently bought startup Earn.com and has been poaching top Wall Street talent to run its OTC block trading division.
