Coinbase Is Exploring Cardano, BAT, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase Is Exploring Cardano, BAT, Stellar Lumens, Zcash, and 0x

blog.coinbase.com

131 pointsandreygrehov34 comments

BAT is cool and the ad blocker in the Brave browser works really well. I use it on ad-heavy websites which burn up my computer on other browsers (which is any news site nowadays...). I still use Chrome day to day though because of the developer tools. Hopefully the project has some success because I appreciate the ethos behind it - empower users to capture some of their value from the attention economy.

How does Brave's performance compare to Chrome/FF with uBlock Origin? Are you saying the other browsers with adblock use more resources?

BAT is a really cool concept. They need to expand beyond Brave though.

In case you were wondering how this news affected the price of these assets (as of this posting):

    ADA  +10.59%
    BAT  +20.82%
    XLM   +9.42%
    ZEC  +15.18%
    0x   +23.40%

And just for comparison (i'm using the last 24-hr numbers here):

    BTC +0.47%
    ETH +1.14%
    LTC +0.56%

Wonder if folks at Coinbase did or could have engaged in insider trading? And if they did, does it even fall under SEC jurisdiction or crypto currencies are in the wild West of insider trading?

This was probably the right thing to prevent insider trading. There was evidence of insider trading when Coinbase added BCH, so they might be just completely avoiding the risk of information leaks.

> Wonder if folks at Coinbase did or could have engaged in insider trading

They'd be fools not to. Cryptocurrency trading is not regulated by SEC type entities (yet). Until it is regulated, you can get away with insider trading and even other activities like wash trading, painting the tape, pump and dump etc.

Not true, you can go to jail for that stuff today. The moment there is a derivative (like a futures contract),the CFTC has jurisdiction (and has already sent subpoenas).

> Not true, you can go to jail for that stuff today

Source? Can you point to a single person prosecuted and sent to Jail for Cryptocurrency insider trading?

I don't believe anyone has been caught yet. Coinbase was in trouble after the BCH situation though, both risking an investigation as well as hurting user and investor confidence.

> Until it is regulated, you can get away with insider trading

You would have criminally mis-used Coinbase’s information which properly belongs to its shareholders. There is no statute against insider trading. It’s all a breach of fiduciary duties.

There was plenty of this and speculation thereof when it comes to the BCH launch in December[1].

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-hit-lawsuit-alleged-inside...

This is why they are making the announcement now. I would suspect that only a few trusted people would have been involved in making the decision on which tokens to explore. They then made this announcement that they are exploring it at the same time as it was announced internally.

> We are making this announcement internally at Coinbase and to the public at the same time to remain transparent with our customers about support for future assets.

This would hopefully avoid another class action lawsuit like they did with Bitcoin Cash: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-hit-lawsuit-alleged-inside....

Thing about announcement like this one is that the correction normally kick in immediately after the surge

See chart https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/zcash https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/0x https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/basic-attention-token

When prominent exchange like binance list coin it follows a complete dump.

I did a little bit of research on what happens to coins when they are listed on Binance, which you can see here: https://paste.debian.net/?show=1033668;lines=0

Roughly, coins would spike hard, then correct somewhat, but still generally be up heaps.

I was shocked at how consistently coins would spike upon or days/weeks before being listed on Binance, so when NANO (then Raiblocks) was known to be soon listed, I traded some BTC for it and sure enough it spiked some 30% or so and I made a little bit off it. It was the only time I made money off crypto from an actual legitimate prediction based on evidence. The market seemed to just be scoffing at the idea of caring to be efficient (Weird-sounding finance vocabulary that basically means the price is already in equilibrium due to investors "already knowing" such obvious information, and traded with respect to it such that you still can't tell if the price is going to go up or down)

Disclosure: I work for the Zcash Foundation.

If you're interested in learning more about how the cryptography in Zcash offers users robust financial privacy, check out the talks and slides from Zcon0: https://z.cash.foundation//blog/zcon0-recap/

https://zkp.science/ is also a great resource, as is the Zcash Company's FAQ: https://z.cash/support/faq.html#what-is-a-zero-knowledge-pro...

BAT is an interesting choice. I'm a fan of Brave browser and it will be intriguing if BAT is able to pull off its mission of monetizing the internet while protecting privacy. I really hope they succeed.

ZRX is the odd-ball for me -- and I was an early investor. It's a governance token and it's not even needed to use with a decentralized exchange. In fact, a lot of exchanges aren't using it for fees.

But it makes since ZRX is part of the list. Its been rumoured for a long time given Coinbase's relationship with members of the 0x team.

Surprised why XRP (Ripple) is not here given that XLM (Stellar), an _almost_ similar protocol and functionality, is being considered.

It might have to do with the SEC? announcing XLM is not a security but things are not clear regarding XRP yet.

Why not Monero?

Probably because it's not backdoored, unlike Zcash.

They may be scared away. Maybe directly listing it would make them complicit in money laundering or something.

Probably because it's more difficult to build infrastructure for. As an example, the Ledger Nano hardware wallet still isn't compatible with Monero but is with ZCash, despite XMR being older and having a much larger market cap than ZEC.

Also Gemini, another leading US exchange, added ZEC recently and Coinbase wanted to catch up.

I'm sorry, but that reads like gibberish. I think I remember Zcash from my Keybase account, but now I'm going to associate it with these other experiments irrespective of how legitimate it might otherwise be.

Good time to buy on rumors...and then sell on news..

How did they decide which ones to add? :)

"In evaluating these assets for exploration, we relied as much as possible on the criteria in our published Digital Asset Framework, but found that many of the criteria required communication with external parties to fully evaluate."

https://pro.coinbase.com/static/digital-asset-framework-2017...

I find it interesting they added zcash but not monero

They may have decided that deposits of zcash should be sent in the clear, not anonymously. I believe monero is always anonymous, so maybe they didn't want to deal with that?

Zcash with only t-addr support is very similar to Bitcoin, on a technical level, and therefore may be easier for Coinbase's eng team to integrate.

I'm more surprised about 0x though...

Really would be nice to support IOTA. Every other coin suffers from transaction speeds slowing down the more popular the coin is.

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