Coinbase has expanded its buying services to Australia
One of the most heavily invested in companies in the bitcoin space has made a new move, expanding to Australia so Aussie’s can now buy bitcoin and ether using Coinbase.
Coinbase, a San Francisco based startup, operates two bitcoin buying services. Coinbase.com, which is a brokerage where people can buy and sell bitcoin, and GDAX, which is Coinbase’s full-fledged bitcoin exchange where traders can buy and sell bitcoins with more advanced features. It’s a subtle difference but they are two different entities.
The update from Coinbase expanding to Australia now makes them available in 33 countriesaround the world. In an official blog post from the company, they wrote:
“We’re focused on creating an open financial system for the world, allowing people to easily buy and sell digital currencies anywhere in the world. Along with this launch in Australia, we are also making the ETH/BTC trading pair available on our professional trading platform GDAX to customers in Australia.”
Coinbase just earlier this month raised $10.5 million USD from Japanese company Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. The investments will be coming from MUFG’s core banking unit and a MUFG venture-capital fund, bank officials said. Previously Coinbase had received $106 million in venture capital, and with this new round of funding it will bring them to a total of $116.5 million in overall investments.
Coinbase also recently added PayPal as a withdrawal payment option, with the hopes to integrate PayPal into bitcoin buying soon. When Coinbase launched the GDAX bitcoin exchange in May, it wasn’t clear how well the exchange would do competing against other exchanges already on the market.
Comparatively speaking, GDAX seems to be holding it’s own processing around ~5000-7000 BTC per day, which is equivalent to $3.2-$4.5 million USD.
Other well known exchange are all processing around the same amount of bitcoin volume per day or less, such as Bitstamp, BTC-e, Gemini, Kraken, and OKCoin. The only outlier that processes much higher volumes of BTC per day is Bitfinex.
