Coinbase Product Update — February 13, 2018
Thanks for all the feedback last week. Every comment and response helps us better understand where we can improve. Here is this week’s product update.
Segwit — lower fees for customers sending Bitcoin; a reminder for customers sending Bitcoin Cash
A common piece of feedback from customers is transaction fees for sending Bitcoin on Coinbase are too high. While transaction fees in Bitcoin have recently decreased, we’re committed to providing customers with options that can help reduce fees. That’s why we’re excited to be enabling SegWit compatible Bitcoin sends and receives for all customers in the near future.
While SegWit should help reduce fees, once we begin rolling out this change, if you incorrectly send Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to a Bitcoin (BTC) address, your funds will no longer be recoverable. To help protect customers from accidentally sending funds, we will be adding the below screens to all of our Bitcoin Receive flows.
In addition to the above changes, we’ve also updated our Send screen to make it clearer that all transaction fees go to miners — not Coinbase. In fact, in many cases, Coinbase supplements customer paid miner fees to ensure transactions are confirmed as quickly as possible.
PayPal
Over the last few weeks, USD withdrawals into PayPal accounts from Coinbase have not been operational. While you may have seen these updates on our status page, we understand that we should have proactively messaged this change more broadly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Our current PayPal offering is not meeting many customers’ expectations. Our plan is to re-enable support for 2 weeks and then disable PayPal entirely until we can overhaul the entire experience. We want to ensure all customers relying on PayPal have enough time to add a new withdrawal method and conduct any desired PayPal transactions. We know many customers prefer PayPal as their USD withdrawal method, and we’re planning on fully re-enabling PayPal later this year. Please visit our status page for updates on PayPal availability.
Credit card update
As you may have seen in our previous update or in the news, some credit card issuers have started placing restrictions or additional fees on credit card purchases of digital currency.
At the moment, Coinbase cannot ensure customers will have a positive purchasing experience with a credit card. As a result, we have disabled adding new credit cards as a payment method for US customers. Debit cards remain unaffected by this change.
We know many customers have added credit cards as their primary payment method; we did not make this decision lightly. We are actively working with card networks and card issuers to find a long term solution. For customers in the UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Singapore, we are collecting feedback and evaluating similar changes.
If you already have a credit card linked to your Coinbase account, you can continue to make purchases so long as your bank allows them. Please note: your bank might charge additional “cash advance” fees. These fees are not collected by Coinbase.
If your credit card is blocked or to avoid cash advance fees, customers can switch their payment method to a debit card or bank account. Switching will save you money and result in higher purchase limits. It takes just a couple of minutes. Visit our payment methods page to get started.
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We’re working hard to improve your Coinbase experience. We might not always get it right, but we know that above all, your satisfaction with our product is what’s important. Our aim is to make Coinbase the easiest place for you to manage and the safest place for you to store your digital assets. To that end, we have lots of improvements coming out in the next few weeks. We’re building better ways of adding and managing your linked accounts, updating the buy and sell experience, improving onboarding, reassessing limits, and much more. As always, thanks for being a Coinbase customer!
