Coinbase has had an eventful year adding many new coins to the exchange and adding to its cryptocurrency staking options as well. Coinbase has now announced it has added Cardano ADA coin to the list of coins that can be staked on the exchange.
Senior product manager Rupmalini Sahu touted Cardano’s top 10 market capitalization as well as its “flexible, sustainable and scalable” blockchain design. Cardano is a layer 1 blockchain similiar to Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche amongst others. Cardano recently opened its blockchain for smart contracts and that has led to an influx of new NFT and decentralized finance (DEFI) projects on the ADA network.
ADA is a proof-of-stake blockchain, unlike Bitcoin which requires computer and electricity power to mine for coins by solving difficult transactions, ADA and other proof-of-stake blockchains are powered by holders of the coin staking their holdings to the network. In return they typically earn rewards like additional coins on that blockchain. Staking crypto tokens has become more and more popular with crypto investors realizing they can earn interest on their crypto holdings, particularly if they were planning to hold the coins for a prolonged period of time anyway.
The staking process may be somewhat technical for some crypto investors who are not as crypto savvy and Coinbase makes this process relatively easy by doing it for their users pooling the users ADA onto the Cardano blockchain, then handling the reward payouts. It currently estimates a 3.75% return every 5 – 7 days on average.
Coinbase also provides staking services for Ethereum (ETH), Algorand, Tezos and Cosmos blockchains as well. The company says they plan to continue to scale the staking portfolio in 2022 likely additional coins throughout the year. The future for the most popular cryptocurrency exchange looks bright as Coinbase now lists over 160 cryptocurrencies and will soon release a much anticipated NFT marketplace as well.
