Understanding Coinbase : vimarsana.com

The Diff
Understanding Coinbase
Is Coinbase an exchange, a broker, a hard-money bank, or a for-profit branch of a religion?
In one sense, Coinbase is an exchange: it s a venue where people buy and sell cryptocurrencies. One of the calls-to-action on their site is View Exchange, and if you click you get this hypnotic real-time look at the Bitcoin market.
In another sense, Coinbase is a broker. It s a custodian for assets, including cash and more speculative assets. Like many such custodians, it also prefers that you use a cash-like asset with a little more pizazz for a broker, that would be a money-market fund; for Coinbase, it might be USD Coin, a blockchain-based dollar substitute. Coinbase, like large broker-dealers, expedites transactions for customers and sometimes takes the other side in order to provide them with liquidity.