Coinbase Pro

Coinbase Pro – is a newish exchange with the major focus on working with professional traders. For operating on the exchange, full verification is required, which is not yet available in some countries, for example, in Russia.

The story behind

Coinbase Pro is an extremely young exchange that offers its traders an opportunity to trade in fiat money (dollar, euro, and pound sterling) and the most popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. The company’s representative office is located in the USA in San Francisco city (California).

Appearance

Coinbase Pro exchange – is a reincarnation of one of the Coinbase trading platforms (GDAX). The platform started operating only in June 2018. The founder is 35-year-old Brian Armstrong. All customer accounts were transferred from the old platform to the new one at the end of June.

The exchange positions itself as a place for professional traders. To large-scale players, even lower transaction fees are provided.

Development

The current version of the platform was launched on June 29, 2018. Before that, the cryptocurrency exchange operated under the GDAX logo (since 2016). Despite being launched inly recently, the platform already demonstrates solid performance. In terms of the daily traded volume, it is one of the top 10 largest exchanges. Every day, the volume of performed operations exceeds 226 million dollars. More than 50% of it accounts for trading within currency pairs consisting of fiat money and Bitcoin.

In total, the platform offers 3 fiat currencies (dollar, euro, and pound sterling) and 5 cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETC, ETH, LTC, BCH).

The volume of traded pairs is fixed separately for each of the countries. The pairs containing fiat money are available only in the USA (dollar), European countries (euro) and the UK separately (pound sterling). The latter is still being implemented into the system. In total, the Coinbase Pro Exchange offers 19 currency pairs. Only 4 of them are available in Canada, Australia and Singapore.

Residents from many countries still are not able to sign up, complete verification and start trading; however, the developers promise that they will expand the coverage of traders soon.

The exchange development forecast for 2019 – 2020

The cryptocurrency exchange already demonstrates excellent results by joining the top 10 largest cryptocurrency trading platforms. The company operates under the BitLicense license and complies with the KYC and AML standards. Availability of a customer insurance program only makes the platform more interesting for investors – in case of force majeure, each user will get a payment amounted to $250,000.

Many people are also attracted by the company’s operating strategy: 98% of all cryptocurrencies are stored on cold wallets and only 2% are used for trading directly. This reduces the risk of massive stealing of funds in case the servers are attacked by hackers.

In the near future, the exchange plans to increase the number of the offered cryptocurrencies. This convenient trading platform, considered in depth in the review, attracts more and more professional traders.

How to use the exchange

Users from various countries can operate on the platform. The official website of the exchange https://pro.coinbase.com/ is available for residents of the United States, European countries, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Singapore. For the residents of Russia and the CIS countries, the platform is also available, but it is impossible to sign up. The only opportunity is to use a proxy server or an anonymizer. If a user tries to sign up from one of these countries without a proxy, a message will appear on the screen that it’s impossible to create an account:

There only two working languages offered by the developers – English and Spanish. To start trading, a user needs to create a new account.

Sign up and verification

All a user needs to do to sign up is to click the “Sign up” or “Get started” button on the home page.

The system will immediately redirect a user to the page for creating a new account. A future trader will need to fill in: last name, first name, email address and password (at least 8 characters). After that, a user will need to put a tick to agree with the user policy and to confirm his lawful age.

After registration, the system will offer to send emails about updates, new products, and working peculiarities. Then, a user is required to verify his email address:

To ensure a higher security level of an account, the system requires specifying a mobile phone number and sends SMS with a validation code.

It is necessary to enter the code from the SMS. It is required to enable the two-factor authentication later. The only thing that is left to do is to complete the account verification.

To complete the procedure, a user can upload his passport, driving license or ID card. Only after this, users will be able to make deposits, withdrawals, and trade on Coinbase Pro.

Fees, limits, deposit and withdrawal

Within the Coinbase Pro wallets, there are no limits – a user can store an unlimited amount of money on his accounts. Deposits can be made in dollars, euros, pounds and cryptocurrency (there are no limits on the exchange; they are limited to transfer systems). Ordinary users won’t be able to withdraw more than 10,000 dollars per day in dollars or cryptocurrency from the account, but the limits can be increased individually.

The exchange charges a fee for the performed transactions, whose amount depends on the operation volume during the last 30 days and the operation type (buy, sell). The service charges no fees for buying currency, but for sellers, it varies from 0.1 to 0.3%.

How to trade

After signing up, new users want to make it clear how to trade on the platform. The site features an attractive interface with the “Trade” tab for trading. It displays the state of the account (separately for each of the currencies). Here, in the single window mode, a user can make a deposit or withdrawal.

The central part of the screen showcases graphs, information about orders and trading history. In the left corner here, a user can buy and sell currency by specifying a required currency pair or selecting one from the available currencies in the upper left corner. There are 3 types of orders available to users: market, limit and stop orders. Additionally, another 5 types of limit orders are offered.

There are no robots for automated trading on the exchange yet; therefore, traders will have to perform operations manually.

Advantages and disadvantages

Despite the fact that the platform for cryptocurrency trading was introduced not long ago, now can be found reviews about functions and operating of the service as a whole. Traders pay attention to the currently existing advantages and disadvantages, although a large number of innovations are planned for the near future. The advantages include:

• reliability;
• availability of fiat money (available for deposit, withdrawal, and trading) in addition to cryptocurrency;
• convenient and user-friendly interface;
• no transaction fees for buyers;
• instant deposits and withdrawal.

Among the serious disadvantages, the following can be mentioned: unavailability of trading in some countries, although the administration promises to expand access in the near future. It’s also impossible to start trading without account verification, which takes time and requires uploading personal documents. At present, only a few currency pairs are available on the Coinbase Pro exchange, which may be critical to many traders interested in new cryptocurrencies. In general, the service is more suitable for advanced market players, but not for beginners.

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