By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
The US largest cryptocurrency exchange, has made several important announcements in its latest blog post, mostly regarding PayPal withdrawals and accepting new US credit cards.
The world’s top banks and financial institutions seem to be not very supportive of Bitcoin and crypto enthusiasts, introducing a ban on digital currency purchases when the blockchain-based ecosystem is struggling against protracted decline.
As reported previously, a growing number of big U.S. and European credit-card issuers has placed restrictions and additional fees on credit card purchases of cryptocurrency. The decision was explained with increased speculations on the current market volatility. However, cryptocurrency customers are still allowed to make payments via their debit cards.
After alarming news from banking sector, Coinbase has realized its credit card update, saying that due to the difficulties some customers had experienced using their credit cards it disabled adding new credit cards as a payment option for US citizens. For customers in the UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Singapore, Coinbase is now considering similar changes based on the feedback analysis.
Making the announcement through its official blog post on February 13, the platform informed their users about ongoing upgrade,
“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.”
Coinbase added that customers who have already linked a credit card to their Coinbase account, are able to make purchases but have to be aware of additional “cash advance” fees the issuer might charge.
By now as the solution to avoid extra costs and get access to higher purchase limits, Coinbase recommends users to switch their payment method to a debit card or bank account. According to Coinbase this process will last no longer than a couple of minutes.
Further the post dwells on the problems with USD PayPal withdrawals that recently have not been operated properly. Coinbase states it will re-enable support for a couple of weeks and then will entirely disable the option, until it can completely overhaul the 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”, Coinbase commented on an apologetic tone.
In addition to the above changes, earlier this month the platform revealed to the public its intention to launch an update on Bitcoin SegWit that was designed to offer a huge potential for scalability of the Bitcoin network by resolving dual problems of transactions’ cost and speed.
But like every update SegWit has pitfalls the platform’s users have to keep in mind while performing their transactions. As soon as Coinbase begins to roll out this update, the funds that will be accidentally transferred to incorrect address become unavailable with no possibility to recover it in the future.