Coinbase Adds Zcash to Retail Crypto Trading Service

Less than a week after adding privacy-focused zcash to its professional trading platform, crypto exchange Coinbase is opening trading to its retail customers.

The company announced Wednesday that clients using coinbase.com or the Android and iOS apps can buy, sell, send, receive or store zcash, though residents in the United Kingdom and the U.S. state of New York will not immediately have access to these services.

The move comes on the heels of Coinbase Pro adding support for zcash last week. At the time, the platform announced that only residents in the U.S. (excluding New York), UK, European Union, Canada, Singapore and Australia would be able to access the coin.

Coinbase's blog post announcing the listing of zcash included information about its privacy features, notably mentioning that users can send either "transparent" or "shielded" transactions.

"The unencrypted/transparent version of the protocol allows third parties to see metadata associated with the communication or transaction, while the encrypted/shielded version protects this information," the post noted (it highlighted similar information in last week's post).

As with Coinbase Pro, Coinbase will not be supporting sending transactions to shielded addresses at this time, though customers can send both types of transactions to the exchange.

The exchange has now listed three of five tokens it first hinted at in July, including the Basic Attention Token and the 0x Protocol token. It has yet to add support for the other two tokens, Cardano and Stellar lumens.

While the "Coinbase effect" resulted in zcash's price rising 15 percent last week after Coinbase Pro announced support, Wednesday did not see such a boost.

Data from CoinDesk's Crypto-Economics Explorer shows that the coin's price jumped 4 percent briefly to reach a 24-hour high of $75.27.

The minor rally proved to be short lived as the cryptocurrency is now trading at $71.94 and is down 3.55 percent on the day.

Sam Ouimet contributed reporting.

Zcash image via Shutterstock