Product Update: Segwit, Taxes, PayPal and Cards
Thanks for all the feedback over the last few weeks. Every comment and response helps us better understand where we can improve. Here’s this week’s product update.
Segwit
On Friday, we announced support for Bitcoin Segregated Witness (SegWit) transactions on Coinbase. As we noted in our announcement, Segwit is the first of many investments we’re making to help lower fees and improve your Coinbase experience. We will complete our roll out of SegWit compatible Bitcoin sends and receives for all customers this week. To learn more, visit our SegWit FAQ page.
SegWit is an important step in scaling the Bitcoin network. We are continuing to invest in our Bitcoin infrastructure and we will be working on implementing additional Bitcoin scalability improvements like transaction batching and improved UTXO management.
While Segwit should help lower transaction fees, it does come with one usability concern. Once we begin rolling out this change, 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. We hope that customers are extra careful when sending Bitcoin Cash, and to help, we will be adding the below screens to all of our Bitcoin receive flows.
Tax Reporting Tools
Over the next week, we will begin rolling out a new taxes page within the Tools section of coinbase.com. Our aim is to make calculating and paying your taxes as easy as possible. To do so, we will be providing a Detailed Transactions Report that will accompany our Gains/Losses report. As many customers have noted, our Gains/Losses report is only accurate if you have only bought or sold digital assets on Coinbase. So this additional, detailed report is aimed at helping those who have sent / received digital assets or bought / sold on other exchanges.
We will be sending a more detailed update to customers shortly.
PayPal
Our current PayPal offering is not meeting customers’ expectations. So, on Tuesday, February 20th, we temporarily re-enabled support for 2 weeks. We will disable PayPal entirely on Wednesday, March 7th 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.
Card Purchases
As you may have seen in our previous update, some customers who had recently purchased digital currency with a Visa credit or debit card had duplicate transactions appear on their cardholder accounts. This issue was not caused by Coinbase. Visa and WorldPay are working to ensure that the duplicate transactions have been reversed and appropriate credits have been posted to cardholder accounts.
Thanks to your feedback, we also began investigating an issue for Scotia Bank customers leading to incorrect charges. We believe this problem is not related to the pre-existing Worldpay and Visa issue outlined above. We are working with Visa to ensure that all erroneous Scotia charges are refunded, and that future purchases will be processed correctly. If you are having an issue with Scotia please reach out to your bank first and then to our support team.
Moreover, last week TD Bank announced that they would be following Citi, Bank of America, Capital One, and a few other issuing banks in blocking purchases of digital currency with credit cards. If you have a TD Bank credit card tied to your Coinbase account, we would recommend switching to a bank or debit card.
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As always, thank you for all of the feedback and support.
