It’s been a rough week for owners of popular cryptocurrency dogecoin but the rally is on.
After Elon Musk gave the meme-inspired digital coin a major boost with a “$10 billion tweet” on Friday, it was also announced America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is set to list the dogecoin in the next six to eight weeks.
Coinbase says it has more than 56 million verified users across 100 countries but previously hadn’t made dogecoin available on its platform.
While announcing the move on a call with investors and analysts, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said there was a need to accelerate how is company added new digital assets to its suite of offerings.
Coinbase’s main offerings include bitcoin and ethereum’s ether coins but the pending addition of dogecoin – now the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency – was met with wild approval by its band of diehards.
The effect of the platform has prompted the term the “Coinbase Effect” which refers to the rise in price of cryptocurrencies listed for sale on a dominant crypto exchange.
Dogecoin jumped as much as 20 per cent on Friday after also being boosted by Musk’s claim he was “working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency”.
“Potentially promising,” the billionaire Tesla CEO tweeted.
Coinbase went public on April 14 and became the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US.
It issued its first quarterly report as a company on Friday. Its shares have experienced the same volatility as the crypto market, falling 38 per cent from their mid-April peak.
But earnings of $3.05 per share on revenue of $1.8 billion were largely in line with investor expectations and Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas believes “crypto is here to stay”.
“Typically, the first coin that people are interested in is bitcoin,” she said, in a wide-ranging interview with CNBC.
“The other crypto assets on the platform are seeing an increasing volume in trading assets on our platform, and so we think over time more and more users are getting engaged with more and more crypto assets and that’s what we’re excited to see.”
Haas would not be drawn on whether investors should take dogecoin seriously.
“We leave that to the decision of our users. We are a platform. We want to offer all assets that meet our listing standards and we hope to be the place where you can come and trade anything that you want to trade,” Haas said.
“That is not the case today. We are slow. We need to add more assets. We’re making big investments to improve the speed of our asset addition, but clearly, the market is speaking.”
But Haas is confident crypto will go mainstream.
“I think crypto is here to stay. I do think crypto is volatile, though, and you can see it that we react to a tweet, that we’ll react to one-off headlines,” Haas said.
“This is a long-term investment. We believe that we are just starting to get to the potential of crypto, but it could be a bumpy journey and we could see days that are up and down like we have seen in the past.”
