A sudden surge in volume has triggered a 4% spike in the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In less than two hours, the market added about $13 billion, bringing the total market cap to $270 billion at time of publishing. according to CoinMarketCap. NEO is up more than 13%, EOS jumped 9% and XRP, Tron, Litecoin and Cardano are all up more than 5%.
The market bounced back as news broke that Coinbase has officially launched Coinbase Custody, a platform designed to help institutional investors get into the cryptocurrency market.
“Last week, Coinbase Custody accepted its first deposit. Today, we’re proud to announce that we’re officially open for business. Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue on-boarding a set of world-class clients that includes leading crypto hedge funds, exchanges and ICO teams.
Coinbase Custody’s mission is to make digital currency investment accessible to every eligible financial institution and hedge fund in the world. We’ll achieve this by striving to become the most trusted and easiest-to-use crypto custody service available. Coinbase Custody is a combination of Coinbase’s battle-tested cold storage for crypto assets, an institutional-grade broker-dealer and its reporting services, and a comprehensive client coverage program.”
According to Coinbase, the specific features in the new platform include:
- On-chain segregation of crypto assets
- Split, offline private keys that require a quorum of geographically distributed agents to use cryptographic hardware to sign transactions
- Multiple layers of security
- Robust cold storage auditing and reporting
Coinbase has been approved to offer the new services through an SEC regulated, institutional broker-dealer.
You can find out more about Coinbase’s efforts to target $10 billion in institutional investor money sitting on the sideline here.
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