Crypto exchange Coinbase is now valued at over $8 billion after it closed a new $300 million funding round.

The US exchange held a Series E investment last week.

Coinbase Funding will Enhance Growth

Coinbase is one of the world’s largest exchanges by trading volume, and it has been at the fore of the cryptocurrency movement when it exploded in 2017.

In the first half of that year, the exchange facilitated almost $15 billion in digital currency exchanges. That number was five times the amount exchanged across all of 2016. Now, in 2018 and moving into 2019, the platform has amassed $525 million from investors to date.

Broadening Coinbase

The company has spent 2018 focusing on broadening its services; the exchange is aiming to cater to institutional investors, and this new Coinbase funding will help further that effort.

Interestingly, the company is planning on broadening its footprint outside of the US. It wants to offer fiat-to-crypto exchange services in other parts of the world.

And it seems this is a strategy most major platforms are implementing. Binance—the world’s largest exchange based on trading volume—has plans to open ten fiat-to-crypto exchanges worldwide by the end of 2019.

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Coinbase Funding will Add Support

At this point in time, Coinbase has support for seven digital assets. These include Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Litecoin (LTC), ZRX Coin (ZRX), and its newest addition, Circle Coin (USDC).

The newly raised capital will also go toward supporting more tokens in the not too distant future.

The platform has the ambition to house potentially “millions” of coins in the future. But for now, when speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September, CEO Brian Armstrong said he believed Coinbase could host hundreds of tokens within “years.”

Coinbase and Circle

Only last week, Coinbase and Circle joined forces to establish their own stablecoin, the USDC, or USD Coin. The tech startup companies are calling their joint venture the ‘CENTRE Consortium,’ and its new website is already up and running.

This is the first time the major US cryptocurrency exchange is supporting a stablecoin and the coin is already available for trading on the exchange.