By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
Coinbase wallet decided to end support for these four altcoins owing to low usage.
On Tuesday, November 28, Coinbase Wallet announced that it would no longer support all the native tokens associated with Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), XRP, and Stellar Lumens (XLM).
Reasons for Ending Support for Bitcoin Cash and Other Coins by Coinbase Wallet
According to Coinbase, the reason behind ending support for these four altcoins is low usage. All four digital assets gained significant prominence during the crypto bull run of 2017. Back then XRP rose to become the third-largest cryptocurrency by market. It still holds its position among the top ten digital assets. However, investor interest has waned due to its ongoing battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
As we know, BCH and ETC are the forked versions of the two top cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, since their issuance five years back, both these assets have lost large portions of the total crypto market share.
Coinbase Wallet has issued an effective deadline of December 5 after which it will no longer support these assets. However, users would be still able to withdraw their balances after that date using a recovery phase. The official announcement from Coinbase reads:
“Any unsupported asset that you hold will still be tied to your address(es) and accessible through your Coinbase Wallet recovery phrase. In order to view or transfer these assets after January 2023, you will need to import your recovery phrase on another non-custodial wallet provider that supports these networks”.
Coinbase said that the Coinbase Wallet will only store the supported digital assets on the network. Thus, sending or receiving unsupported assets via the Coinbase Wallet could cause users to lose them.
Networks Supported by Coinbase Wallet
Coinbase Wallet supports Ethereum and all EVM-compatible networks in both the browser extension and mobile app. Some of the pre-configured networks with Coinbase Wallet include Arbitrum, Avalanche C-Chain, BNB Chain, Gnosis Chain, Fantom Opera, Optimism, Polygon, xDai, and Solana.
Users just need to link their Coinbase.com account with their Coinbase wallet for easy transfer of crypto between the two. However, “the supported crypto on Coinbase Wallet may not be available for buying and selling on Coinbase.com and vice versa”.
The Coinbase wallet supports thousands of tokens, especially the ERC-20 tokens. It also supports stablecoins such as USDC and DAI.