Coinbase announced that it is planning to add 90 percent of all cryptocurrencies by aggregate market capitalization to its platform. Despite Coinbase’s commitment to listing more crypto assets, trading volume on Coinbase Pro shows lackluster investor interest in altcoins while BTC dominates trading volume.
Coinbase Pro trading volumes
Approximately $461 million was traded in the last 24 hours in Coinbase Pro, according to CoinMarketCap. Even though the exchange has been adding a variety of new cryptocurrencies over the last few years, the vast majority of the trading activity is concentrated in Bitcoin.
As a matter of fact, Bitcoin accounts for 75.1 percent of the total trading volume on the San Francisco-based exchange. Meanwhile, the other most traded cryptocurrencies on Coinbase Pro are Ethereum with 8.8 percent trading volume, Litecoin with 7.5 percent, and XRP and Bitcoin Cash with 2.4 percent each.
The rest of the cryptocurrencies that are available on the platform including Chainlink, Stellar, EOS, Dai, Ethereum Classic, 0x, Basic Attention Token, Augur, Zcash, Decentraland, Golem, Loom Network, district0x and Civic, combined, had a trading volume of less than $18 million over the last 24 hours, only representing 3.9 percent of the activity on the exchange.
As Coinbase continues to add new cryptocurrencies, it does not seem to be benefiting from them. MANA, GNT, LOOM, DNT, and CVC each had a trading volume lower than $20,000 over the last 24-hours—meaning they hardly impact the company’s revenue. Instead, the firm could actually be exposing itself to U.S. regulatory scrutiny and other legal risks.
Over the last few years Coinbase has been criticized for slowing down the adoption of Bitcoin. After SegWit was integrated into BTC via soft fork on August 2017, to allow more transactions to fit in a single block, the firm took more than seven months to enable SegWit transactions on the platform. Now the cryptocurrency exchange has been working on batching transactions for more than a year since its CEO Brian Armstrong first talked about it.
Even today, Coinbase continues to promote and add altcoins rather than provide full support for Bitcoin, argued Jameson Lopp and other BTC supporters in the community. In addition to allegations of user surveillance, customer support deficiencies, and other issues, user outrage culminated in the “Delete Coinbase” movement earlier this year.
