(Bloomberg) — Coinbase Global Inc. said that so-called altcoins — tokens other than Bitcoin and Ethereum — made up 68% of trading volume in the fourth quarter, the highest percentage yet for the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange.
The shift reflects a decision last year to focus on increasing the stable of coins listed to help ease the impact of Bitcoin’s price swings on revenue and earnings.
Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong made a push last year to list every digital coin deemed legal. The company added 95 coins for trading last year, and more than 70 for its custody service, the company said.
At the time, Coinbase was seeing competitors gaining market share by listing more coins, as tokens such as Shiba Inu emerged as retail favorites. Coinbase listed Shiba in September. Today, Coinbase still lists fewer coins than much of the competition: 160 versus 404 coins on rival Binance, per data tracker CoinMarketCap. But its trading volume market share has increased, Chief Financial Officer Alesia Haas said during the company’s earnings call Thursday.
Coinbase plans to continue to grow its portfolio of supported coins, and the diversification could help make results less volatile, Haas said.
“The trading is going somewhere, it just goes into different pockets of the ecosystem,” Haas. “We think this will temper down the volatility.”
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