From Monday April 26, a range of trading pairs are going to be introduced.
Coinbase Pro has announced that it is listing the Tether stablecoin.
The exchange, which is geared toward advanced users, says it regularly receives requests from customers to list certain assets — and coins with the most interest are given the green light if they “meet our standards.”
From Monday April 26, a range of trading pairs are going to be introduced, including BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, USDT/EUR, USDT/GBP, USDT/USD and USDT/USDC. They will gradually be rolled out once sufficient supply of Tether is generated.
Coinbase’s blog post on the matter acknowledged that Tether is the most widely used stablecoin in the world. At the time of writing, it has a market cap of $49 billion.
It’s important to stress that, at least for now, USDT cannot be purchased by consumers who rely on Coinbase.com or its mobile apps.
What’s Changed?
The end of a long-running legal battle between Tether, Bitfinex and the New York Attorney General — which resulted in an $18.5 million fine — may have helped change Coinbase’s thinking when it comes to USDT.
Tether, which aims to deliver a stablecoin that is faithfully pegged to the value of $1, has long faced accusations that it doesn’t have enough dollars sitting in a bank account to honor all of the USDT in existence.
But in late March, the company released an independent accountant’s report that showed it had total assets of $35,276,327,156 as of February 28 — beyond the 35,111,966,857 tokens that had been issued as of that time.
Reacting to the news, analyst Adam Cochran said Coinbase wouldn’t have listed the asset unless it was certain that Tether is properly backed. He tweeted:
“This strongly legitimizes Tether, which underpins huge price action, and now makes arbitrage to non-fiat exchanges more direct which is huge for capital flows.”
