Product Update — March 6th

We appreciate all of your feedback over the last few weeks. Here a few updates / changes from the last several days.

SegWit

SegWit is now available to 100% of customers. SegWit is an important step in scaling the Bitcoin network, and is the first of many product improvements we’re making to help lower fees and improve the Coinbase customer experience. We are continuing to invest in our Bitcoin infrastructure and will be working on implementing additional Bitcoin scalability improvements like transaction batching and improved UTXO management.

As we mentioned previously, Segwit does come with one usability concern. If you incorrectly send Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to a Bitcoin (BTC) address, your funds will not be recoverable. Sending the incorrect digital assets to a deposit address will result in permanent loss. To help protect against mistakes, we have added the below screens to all of our Bitcoin receive flows.

PayPal

We will disable PayPal entirely on Wednesday, March 7th. Because our existing PayPal offering did not fully meet customers’ expectations, we have decided to disable support for PayPal until we can overhaul the entire experience. We know many customers prefer PayPal as their USD withdrawal method, and we’re planning on fully re-enabling PayPal later this year.

To ensure all customers relying on PayPal have enough time to add a new withdrawal method and conduct any desired PayPal transactions, we temporarily re-enabled Paypal for a two-week period, ending March 7th.

ETH and BCH Transactions

Over the last few months, we have seen some of our customers’ ETH transactions not get accepted by their corresponding smart contracts. We recommend customers do not send funds to smart contracts from their Coinbase account since contracts often have special requirements. When these transactions fail, they were not automatically credited back to the sender’s Coinbase account. We were able to resolve this issue and have started crediting ETH back to impacted customer accounts this week. If you believe you have had a similar issue, please reach out to our support team.

Additionally, late last year, we noticed that there were several customers who voluntarily closed their Coinbase accounts before we could give them their BCH balances. Over the next few days, we will be emailing all impacted customers. You will be able to return to Coinbase and either withdraw or sell your Bitcoin Cash. If you were impacted and do not receive an email within the next 7 days, please reach out to our support team.

Wires and SEPA

This week, we rolled out changes to the wire and SEPA experience. As we have scaled, we’ve seen many customers encounter issues when using “push” payments on Coinbase, and this new experience will help catch these problems before customers send their funds.

When sending wires and SEPA payments, we have a few requirements that help us ensure funds are credited to your account in a timely manner. First, funds can only be pushed into your Coinbase account if the name on your bank account matches that on your Coinbase account. Next, there there a few financial institutions that send funds in a manner that is not compatible with our service:

• UK — Nationwide
• US — Fidelity, Schwab and Silicon Valley Bank

We’re working on resolving these bank-specific issues, so we can ensure funds from all financial institutions are accepted.

Lastly, only wire transfers that are greater than $10,000 and less than $250,000, and SEPA payments that are less than €250,000 can be accepted. We’re working on enabling smaller wire transfers for our US customers; however, for the time being, we would recommend using ACH for all transfers of less than $10,000. These modifications to the wire and SEPA experience will help us check these requirements and ensure we can credit your push payments as quickly as possible.

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As always, thank you for all of the feedback and support.