The New Ripple-Based Service From Coinbase

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that one of the biggest exchanges in the world, Coinbase had subtly launched a product to its roster, which is already quite impressive. The service is found under the international redirect on the companies website but even so, this wasn’t made known to the public in an official announcement.

This service touts itself as allowing for users which send money on a global scale for free. This will utilise the stablecoin launched by CENTRE partners Coinbase and Circle, USDC and XRP.  

This will allow users to send these cryptocurrencies across border without any waiting time for countries that Coinbase is supported in. so even though this sounds like blockchain-enabled remittances, the firm has made it clear that this isn’t really the case. Coinbase international processes transactions for free since the company will be sending crypto ledger transfer within its own books rather than on-chain.

As reported by Ethereum World News, “as to why this product exists, a firm representative told CoinDesk that International is 'primarily designed' to be an 'education resources' for consumers to learn about the benefits of using digital currencies, whether it be Bitcoin, XRP, or otherwise, in cross-border payments.”

Funnily enough, Coinbase decision to stick with the Ripple-tied XRP and USDC cryptocurrencies comes as another slap in the face many of which many have already got a certain distaste for the mentioned exchange.

“The firm may have done this for a logical reason though. As XRP transactions take three to five seconds to process on its ledger and cost under a sent. Much of the same is seen with USDC, with the Ethereum-based token taking ~15 seconds to send with a sub-$1 fee. On the other hand, classic bank transfers can often take upwards of 24 hours, and cost upwards of $30. Ouch.”

The product’s premise does make sense but some people had an issue with the choice of cryptocurrency. The popular analyst and journalist, Larry Cermak took to Twitter recently to express his thoughts on Coinbase and made it clear that international doesn’t actually make sense.

Coinbase is starting to offer free transfers from one Coinbase user to another but it only supports XRP and USDC. This is a really weird move since all internal transfers of all cryptocurrencies are free for Coinbase so why restrict to XRP and USDC? https://t.co/kMRipRzwqJ

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) 1 April 2019