Zcash Coinbase Listing Not Lifting ZEC Price

After listing ZCash on its institutional investor-focused Coinbase Pro platform on November 29, Coinbase has now listed the privacy-centric coin on its retail investor focused regular platform.

They made the announcement on both Medium and Twitter. Customers can login to the online version of Coinbase or use either the iOS or Android mobile versions to buy, sell, store, send, and receive ZEC.

There are some jurisdictions that won’t have access to the altcoin on Coinbase, namely the United Kingdom and New York in the United States.

As the Coinbase announcement explained:

ZEC will be available for customers in most jurisdictions, but will not initially be available for residents of the United Kingdom or the state of New York. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.

Because Zcash is designed as a privacy coin, shielding transactions to make them anonymous, Coinbase had to address the privacy features of the coin and how it impacts buying and selling through Coinbase.

Initially, customers can send ZEC to Coinbase from both transparent and shielded addresses, but only send off Coinbase to transparent addresses. In the future, we’ll explore support for sending ZEC to shielded addresses in locations where it complies with local laws.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts fear that the KYC/AML legislation in the US will cause ZCash to abandon its focus on privacy, but Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox feels Coinbase will uphold privacy enhancements featured by Zcash.

“As the industry matures, we believe privacy protections will be mandated by most exchanges, governments and other financial institutions, leading to the broad adoption of Zcash.”

— zooko (@zooko) November 29, 2018

No Market Reaction to Coinbase Listing ZEC

While you might have thought ZEC would gain in response to the Coinbase listing news, exactly the opposite has been the case.

In fact, Zcash has been falling ever since the announcement of the Coinbase Pro listing. On November 29, 2018 it hit a high of $90.30, but has been trading steadily lower since.

As of December 6, ZEC is at $62.97, fallen from $68.41 before the latest listing announcement.

There have been 2 theories explaining why ZEC is failing to make a sustained move higher. The first is putting the falling price down to investor fatigue in this bear market and the continued downside pressure on the entire market due to Bitcoin falling below $4,000.

The second theory is that cryptocurrency traders simply aren’t all that interested in ZEC.

Do you have another theory that explains why ZEC fell rather than rising after being listed on Coinbase? Let us know what it is below in the comments.