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Comment by mlacks | Hacker News Reader

I use coinbase as it was the easiest and least sketchy way to buy a couple of years ago. I feel though that a lot of the big gains for a particular coin are made before coinbase authorizes that coin for trade on their platform. Can anyone provide some insight/ ELI5 as to why the coin selection is curated vs a free for all?

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It takes work to support trading if a coin. Coinbase in particular is conservative about listing new coins because they don’t want to run afoul of sec rules and list coins that qualify as securities. They blogged about what factors they consider when listing new coins a few years back. Coinbase is often the last to list a coin and rarely the first so if you only use Coinbase you are getting in later to n the game. The exchanges that list every junk coin under the sun though are often offshore and hire risk in many regards.

> Can anyone provide some insight/ ELI5 as to why the coin selection is curated vs a free for all?

Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Any support for new currencies have to researched, developed, tested, deployed and maintained (unless they are ERC20 tokens, then they'll require less of everything but still needs work to be added). So there is no way they can offer "free for all" as not all crypocurrencies are created equal.

> a lot of the big gains for a particular coin are made before coinbase authorizes that coin

interesting observation. it seems to be the case for binance as well. i see coins gaining 20-30x before or right when it gets listed. perhaps “insider” trading right before a coin listing?

As for coin curation i suppose thats as a means to filter out scams.

Perhaps there is also an element of limiting competition for vested interests?

A lot of listing is preceded by extensive campaigns to build support to get a coin listed. It's unsurprising that this leads to prices going up. "Insider" is extremely vague here given that a lot of this will be activity surrounding the dev teams that may or may not have anything to do with the people who started the coin.

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