Coinbase to Offer New Crypto Trading Pairs for British Pounds

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has announced it will begin rolling out new order book trading pairs for British pounds (GBP) on Sept. 7 for traders based in the U.K.

David Farmer, general manager of Coinbase Pro, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that the order book exchange will offer trading services for GBP against ethereum, bitcoin cash, ethereum classic and litecoin, in addition to the current sole offering of bitcoin.

Each new pair will first go through a post-only phase and then a limit-only stage before full trading services can be available, such as limit, market and stop orders. In the post-only phase, he continued, the exchange will only allow users to post limit orders but matching will not be available for at least 10 minutes.

After that, limit orders will start matching but no market orders can be submitted. The limit-only phase will also take another minimum of 10 minutes.

The news follows a report in early August that Coinbase had enabled direct withdrawal and deposit services for GBP for the first time through the UK's Faster Payments Scheme.

That replaced the previous method of having to convert GBP to euro to fund accounts, a process that normally took days to complete via a bank transfer.

The new GBP pairs also arrive months after the U.S. exchange secured an e-money license from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, paving the way for Coinbase to expand its services to the U.K. and Europe.

Coinbase image via Shutterstock