Coinbase’s crypto wallet will no longer support four older cryptocurrencies.
In an announcement on Tuesday, Coinbase said that it will end support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Stellar (XLM) and XRP on the Coinbase Wallet in January 2023. The tokens will remain listed and tradeable on the Coinbase exchange.
The company cited “low usage” as the reason for discontinuing the assets on its wallet. Coinbase said the decision to remove these tokens was made after “careful evaluation” – something that allows the exchange to continue investing in new features.
The four tokens in questions are among the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market cap. BCH, XLM and ETC all have a market cap of between $2 billion and $2.7 billion, while XRP is the seventh-largest crypto asset with a market cap of $20 billion.
“This does not mean your assets will be lost,” said Coinbase, explaining that users with balances of these assets will still be able to access them using their Coinbase recovery phrase.
In order to transfer assets after January 2023, however, users will need to import their recovery phrase on another non-custodial wallet that supports these networks.
The move to remove these tokens from the Coinbase Wallet attracted a considerable amount of criticism from the users, particularly those associated with the respective token communities.
Low usage for BCH was because it was one of the worst BCH wallets.
– No support for tokens.
– No support for double spend proofs.
– Consistently didn't detect zero conf transactions.Blaming usage when you never kept up with the latest features of the chain is pretty lame.
— Josh Ellithorpe (@zquestz) November 30, 2022
Imagine removing wallet support for tokens claiming “low volume” I’m also going to remove my wallet app from my phone and going to claim too many shades of blue 🤣
— tony/onitenshu (@onitenshu) November 29, 2022