Coinbase may have announced plans to list hundreds of new assets over the coming months and years, but that doesn’t mean that the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange has lost its status as crypto-token kingmaker.
Yesterday, on Oct. 11, Coinbase announced that it had begun the process of listing 0x (ZRX), an ERC-20 token that runs on Ethereum, on its professional order-book exchange Coinbase Pro (formerly GDAX). At present, traders can make ZRX deposits, though the order books had not yet opened for trading as of the time of writing.
In the meantime, the ZRX price has been surging. The token’s trading value spiked from about $0.68 to a high of just under $0.92 in the minutes following the announcement. Though it has since settled down from that intraday peak, 0x continues to trade near $0.77, representing a 24-hour gain of about 17 percent that is far above the 0.5 percent increase seen by the cryptocurrency market as a whole.
With its listing, 0x becomes the first ERC-20 token listed on the Coinbase platform. Ethereum (ETH) itself has been available on the exchange for quite some time now, while the company added support for ethereum classic (ETC) over the summer.
Coinbase had announced in June it was exploring listing 0x in some jurisdictions, along with zcash (ZEC), stellar (XLM), and basic attention token (BAT).
Importantly, the 0x token will not initially be available through Coinbase eponymous brokerage service, which is tailored for retail investors and is especially popular among first-time buyers. The company said that it will make a separate announcement when this occurs.
Notably, the 0x rally confirms that the “Coinbase Bounce” remains as powerful as ever, alluding to the fact that cryptocurrencies have tended to see strong upward swings in the wake of their listing on the popular exchange, which had heretofore only listed a handful of assets.
Conventional wisdom says that the Coinbase Bounce should have diminishing returns moving forward, particularly since the exchange has outlined a new listing framework that will likely see its list of supported tokens expand to rival the hundreds available on most trading platforms.
However, that may not be the case, at least for microcap tokens who, to some degree or another, rely on exchange listings to maintain relevance. Earlier this week, Binance — the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — delisted four cryptocurrency tokens that the company said no longer met the platform’s quality assurance standards. The value of those coins plunged following the announcement, highlighting the degree to which many tokens depend on speculative trading give them value.
Featured Image from Shutterstock. Charts from TradingView .