One of the biggest reasons why cryptocurrency markets are considered to be a ‘risky’ investment is the fact that many a times - prices rise or fall due to speculations. Now speculations play a major role in stock markets too - but the impact that speculations have on cryptocurrencies is way higher. A rumour that broke out a couple of days ago indicated that Ripple might be listed on Coinbase soon.
This rumour led to a large number of people buying Ripple because as a general trend, currencies that get listed on Coinbase witness large buying volumes after they are listed - leading to a price boom. One example of this could be the recent listing of Bitcoin Cash on Coinbase where prices shot from $1800 to almost $3400 in December (however it was later discovered that insider trading may be responsible for it).
Rumours of Ripple being listed on Coinbase peaked when Brad Garlinghouse, the Ripple CEO appeared on a panel discussion along with Asiff Hirji, President of Coinbase on CNBC’s Fast Money. Following the news, Ripple, which was trading between a price of $0.7 to $0.9 surged beyond the $1-mark - rising by 6% over weekly averages. Ripple remains the only of the top-5 cryptocurrencies to not be listed on Coinbase.
Coinbase trades in four cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin are all listed on the platform, but Ripple isn’t. Ripple, at one point of time, had successively overtaken Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum to rise to the #2 spot in cryptocurrency markets - also becoming the first ever altcoin to cross the $100 Billion market cap in the process. However, it has all been a downhill ride for Ripple since then, as the currency from $3.7 to $0.7 over the months.
In what may come as more bad news for Ripple enthusiasts, Coinbase has now specifically stated in a tweet that they do not plan to list any new cryptocurrencies at the time on the Coinbase or GDAX platforms. Ripple being the only top-5 currencies to not be listed on Coinbase could possibly have something to do with the fact that the currency is comparatively more centralized than the others on the top top-5 list. However, there is a significant interest in the markets which may coerce Coinbase to introduce Ripple support at some point of time, but that ‘point of time’ is definitely not now.
Here’s the statement from the company stating that there are no plans to list a new currency at the moment: “Our January 4th, 2018 statement continues to stand: we have made no decision to add additional assets to either GDAX or Coinbase. Any statement to the contrary is untrue and not authorized by the company.” After Coinbase clarified this, the price of Ripple fell below the $1 mark again.
Coinbase itself is going through a tough time at the moment. The exchange is facing lawsuits from users over insider trading and price manipulation which led to the rise in Bitcoin Cash prices. The allegation against them is that Coinbase knew the exact date and time of when Bitcoin Cash trading on the platform would go live while users of the platform were given a very short notice, giving the employees an unfair chance on profiting on BCH. Coinbase was also in the news over giving away information of 13,000 users to the IRS.