Digital currency exchange Coinbase today provided a list of updates dubbing it “spring cleaning” time for the popular San-Francisco headquartered company. The most significant of which is network fees for on-chain transactions will now be passed on to clients of the exchange, which you can read more about in detail below.
Coinbase Product Manager Ankur Nandwani stated:
“We’ve made some hard product decisions and will be rolling out a few changes in the next several weeks. We try a lot of new ideas at Coinbase, but we also value a product that is free from clutter. This requires us to periodically take a hard look at which features are being used, and do some housekeeping. To fulfill our mission of creating an open financial system for the world, we will continue to experiment with new and innovative products.”
Here’s is the list of upcoming product changes:
- Removing support for Bits – Bits is a way to view bitcoin in smaller units. Coinbase will discontinue supporting bits as a bitcoin unit starting March 21st, 2017. Customers who have set bits as their default bitcoin unit will be automatically be migrated to BTC. Coinbase found that the feature was rarely used and added confusion when sending and receiving bitcoin transactions.
- Disabling SMS account access – Coinbase will discontinue SMS support for accessing Coinbase accounts on March 21st, 2017. When launched 4 years ago, smartphones were still a novelty in many parts of the world, but with the rapid growth of smartphones, the company feels that its iOS and Android app can provide a much better experience.
- Disabling user payment pages – Coinbase will discontinue support for user payment pages on March 21st, 2017. When launched in May 2014, the company was just beginning the development of their mobile apps and there was no easy way for customers to receive payments. Coinbase mobile apps now enable customers to easily receive payments.
- Network transaction fees – Will discontinue paying network transaction fees for on-chain transactions starting March 21st, 2017. Network transaction fees do not go to Coinbase, they go to the miners of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. Since Coinbase’s founding, they’ve been paying network fees on behalf of customers to help support the growth of the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. “Now that the exchange has over 6 million users worldwide, this has become a significant cost,” says Coinbase. Fees will be assigned dynamically based on current network conditions and will be paid by customers when they send an on-chain transaction. Transactions between Coinbase accounts will continue to be off-chain and free.
