Coinbase Not Currently Investing in Decentralized Exchange Sector, Executive Confirms

United States cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is not planning to launch a decentralized exchange (DEX), a senior executive told cryptocurrency news media outlet The Block in an interview on May 29.

Speaking on a range of topics around Coinbase’s activities, Emilie Choi, the company’s vice president of Business, Data & International, said that despite acquiring P2P platform Paradex last year, decentralized trading is not a priority.

“I think the decentralized exchange space, it’s gonna be interesting to watch it play out. I think it has a lot of potential,” she said.

Coinbase has targeted high-volume investors both in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, focusing on mainstream on and off-ramps into the cryptocurrency industry.

This has placed the company in a different position to crypto-only platforms such as Binance, Choi says, which continues to drop details of its forthcoming decentralized exchange launch.

“Obviously we are the fiat to crypto bridge. We’re the fiat to crypto bridge and we play a different role than others in the space in terms of trying to be the safe trusted center of the crypto economy,” she continued. Choi added:

“We have to make sure that if we offer a dex that we’re doing it in a way that is safe and secure and compliant. I think that there’s not a lot of clarity right now on how that would work. We think this space is interesting but we’re not actively investing in it right at this moment.”

Binance regularly tops the exchange leaderboard worldwide for overall trading volumes. However, Choi implied in the interview that the two operators move in separate sectors of the crypto world.

“We couldn’t probably be more differentiated than them in terms of the focus on the fiat to crypto bridge and being that safe trusted center of the crypto economy. So I think they’re playing one game, we’re playing another,” she said.

As Cointelegraph reported, rumors currently claim that Coinbase is in talks with Facebook concerning their GlobalCoin, a rumored in-house cryptocurrency token which could launch next year.