Coinbase (YC S12) Opens to Europe

Looks more about jurisdiction. They omit a few large markets (Great Britain, Germany, Poland).

Quote: "Some countries have posted guidance on it, while others have been totally silent about it".

Quote from an interview with Armstrong, their CEO:

For the expansion, Armstrong said that Coinbase reached out to a number of countries in the region, writing letters and engaging local regulators in dialogue about its ability to extend its services to their jurisdictions.

Countries were then given the greenlight based on how favorably they responded to this outreach, and how specific their regulatory requirements were for bitcoin businesses.

Armstrong said:

“We reached out to each country in that region on a case-by-case basis. It was a lot of bank partnerships, a lot of legal and compliance work and some technical integration as well.”

From: http://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-launches-bitcoin-buying-sel...

Can't quite see myself using Coinbase over Bitonic as the 'fast but pricy way', or using it over Kraken as the 'slow but cheap way'.

Except on the selling end of things, Bitonic has great buy prices but selling is pretty crappy.

Perhaps they're going for the low hanging fruit first?

Canada already has an established exchange with 10 ATMs located across the country and an established debit mastercard program. Plus there's a second exchange that has been advertising heavily for the past year.

Coinbase's efforts in Canada would probably fall on deaf ears at the moment. Anybody in Canada wishing to purchase Bitcoin has been (somewhat) easily capable of doing so for the past 3 years.

I guess they might still be awaiting some regulation, which is still heavily in flux in the UK. And the UK is definitely outside of the EU on some issues, in particular currency, as they retained the british pound. Onboarding tens of countries by adding 1 currency makes a lot more sense for a startup than adding just 1 country for 1 currency.

It'll definitely happen at some point though, in fact some weeks ago before all of this was announced a dropdown menu with 'US' and 'UK' suddenly appeared in the country selector, sparking speculation of their first foray outside the US.