Coinbase expands its reach to Latin America and Southeast Asia

The largest US digital currency exchange, Coinbase, has expanded its services to the Latin America and Southeast Asia regions.

The San Francisco-based company announced yesterday in a blog post that it was launching its platforms in 11 more countries, enabling customers in those jurisdictions to store, trade, send, and receive cryptocurrencies on Coinbase Pro and Coinbase.com.

“Customers in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Chile, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and New Zealand can now sign up on Coinbase.com and download our iOS and Android apps, or sign up for a Coinbase Pro account, to access crypto-to-crypto trading options,” Coinbase announced.

Up until yesterday, Coinbase’s services had been available to customers in Europe, the US and Canada. The latest expansion increases Coinbase’s reach to 53 countries, spread across four continents.

Interestingly, the post also highlights a growing trend of users shifting more and more to crypt-to-crypto trading.

“Direct trading between cryptos is increasingly the new norm and in the last year has overtaken traditional fiat to crypto trading across the globe,” Coinbase said, pointing to a chart showing that crypto-to-crypto trades accounted for 51% of the verified trading volume in February 2019. This represents a significant increase from the 41% recorded in August 2018. Meanwhile, crypto-to-stablecoin volumes have experienced identical growth over that period. Conversely, fiat-to-crypto volumes have decreased by 20 percentage points.

Coinbase has 10 crypto-to-crypto trading pairs on its platform for professional traders, with users able to trade Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and other major digital coins against Bitcoin. Meanwhile, its stablecoin-based trading offerings include mostly smaller tokens such as Zcash (ZEC), Maker (MKR), Basic Attention Token (BAT) and Golem (GNT), which can be traded against the USD Coin (USDC).

Coinbase also has fiat-to-crypto markets and supports trading with US dollars, euros and pounds.