On 1st April, Bitcoin services provider Coinbase is going to close officially its tip feature advising users to switch over to ChangeTip.
Today, Coinbase announced closing bitcoin Tip Button. This tool was launched in November to help customers send and accept micropayments in an easy and fast way. With a single click. When the company announced their new feature, the default amount sent per tip was 300 bits (about $0.10 USD ), but senders could customize the amount.
It’s obvious that tipping is becoming viral and the exchange of micromoney is rampant. Several social media such as Github, Reddit, Twitter use it.
The company’s blog read in November:
Coinbase merchants like Humble Bundle, Wikipedia, United Way and services built using the Coinbase API like ChangeTip have proven that consumers have a strong desire to make small payments online. To date, over 30% of orders on Coinbase are $1 or below. In an effort to make sending small amounts of bitcoin easier than ever, we decided to build the tip button.
At the time of the Tip Button launch, Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong said about that feature:
“Instead of giving them a thumbs up or emoji icons, it will be more like a thumbs up with a tiny cash payment along with it.”
In order to “monetize content directly and engage with their audiences in a new way”, such bloggers, podcasters and platforms as Adam Carolla, AVC, Dustin Curtis, Daslee, Beacon Reader, The Morning News etc. used the Coinbase Tip Button.
But now the customers are encouraged to move to ChangeTip:
“The project has seen some good usage since we launched it, with about 10,000 users accepting bitcoin tips across a variety of websites.However, another excellent tipping service in the bitcoin community, ChangeTip, has gotten some even better traction, and done a great job at pushing the tipping ecosystem forward. So today we’d like to show our support for them and encourage existing users of our tip button to migrate over to ChangeTip.”
As soon as Coinbase is providing bitcoin infrastructure (secure APIs for bitcoin storage, exchange, wallets, and merchant tools), the company has a high estimate of Change Tip:
“ChangeTip is an excellent example of a company which uses our APIs, and we’d like to support them instead of competing with them. Our goal is to have a thriving ecosystem of many companies in the bitcoin space building innovative applications like this.”
Coinbase also notes that the Tip Button will be officially closed on April 1st. Moreover, the team promises to help users migrate over during the coming weeks.
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