On Thursday (29 November 2018), crypto exchange Coinbase announced that it had listed privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) on “Coinbase Pro”, its platform for professional/experienced traders.

Coinbase Pro started accepting Zcash (ZEC) deposits at 10:00 PT (18:00 UTC) on November 29th; as with previous new listings, the exchange will continue accepting deposits “for at least 12 hours prior to enabling trading.” And as usual, only when there is sufficient liquidity, Coinbase Pro will enable trading of the ZEC/USDC pair to start. The jurisdictions currently supported are the U.S. (excluding NY state), Canada, UK, European Union, Singapore, and Australia.

Note that only once Coinbase has seen that there are no technical issues with ZEC trading on its Pro platform, it will consider adding ZEC to Coinbase Consumer (Coinbase.com) or its mobile apps.

ZEC is going to have a four-step staged launch. Each of these stages will be followed independently “for each new order book”. If at any point, one of these new order books fails to meet Coinbase’s standards “for a healthy and orderly market”, they may “keep the book in one state for a longer period of time, or suspend trading.”

The four stages are:

  • Transfer-only. During this stage, which started at 10am PT on Thursday November 29th, customers can transfer ZEC into their Coinbase Pro account. “Customers will not yet be able to place orders, and no orders will be filled on these order books. Order books will be in transfer-only mode for at least 12 hours.”
  • Post-only. “In the second stage, customers can post limit orders but there will be no matches (completed orders). Order books will be in post-only mode for a minimum of one (1) minute. This market state may be kept short or extended to increase market health during launch.”
  • Limit-only. “In the third stage, limit orders will start matching but customers will be unable to submit market orders. Order books will be in limit-only mode for a minimum of 10 minutes.”
  • Full trading. “In the final stage, full trading services will be available, including limit, market, and stop orders.”

At press time, according to data from CryptoCompare, ZEC is trading at $84.10, up 2.54% in the past 24-hour period.

Featured Image Courtesy of Coinbase