US headquartered bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase today announced its intention to support the Ethereum ERC20 technical standard on the exchange in the coming months.
ERC20 is a technical standard used for Ethereum smart contracts. ERC20 assets have become a way for teams to quickly build interoperable contracts/assets. More recently, the company’s Ethereum wallet and Dapp browser Toshi added native support for ERC20.
What ERC20 support means for Coinbase Services
- Coinbase Custody — the Custody team is evaluating a set of assets to support for deposits and withdrawals. Note: Custody will likely support more assets than those available to trade on GDAX or Coinbase for the foreseeable future.
- GDAX — the GDAX team will wait for additional regulatory clarity before deciding which ERC20 assets to support on GDAX. Support for ERC20 will also give the company a path to enabling the safe recovery of customer ERC20 assets inadvertently sent to GDAX Ethereum addresses.
- Coinbase Asset Management — per the index methodology, any asset listed on GDAX will be added to the Coinbase Index on a market capitalization weighted basis.
- Coinbase — per previous guidance, Coinbase will only list assets after they are listed on GDAX. After evaluating factors such as liquidity, price stability, and other market health metrics, the company may choose to add any ERC20 asset added to GDAX to the Coinbase platform. With that being said, GDAX will likely have more assets listed on the platform than the Coinbase platform, i.e. listing on GDAX does not guarantee listing on Coinbase.
The Coinbase team said:
“This paves the way for supporting ERC20 assets across Coinbase products in the future, though we aren’t announcing support for any specific assets or features at this time. We are announcing this both internally and to the public as consistent with our process for adding new assets.”
“Additionally, like GDAX, support for ERC20 will also give us a path to enabling the safe recovery customer ERC20 assets inadvertently sent to Coinbase Ethereum addresses.”