Coinbase is known for enabling new users to own cryptocurrencies easily without having to understand the technology behind it. The platform allows the deposit or withdrawal of cash against a cryptocurrency to your bank account. However, that’s where the convenience ends.
Coinbase integrated Paypal as a withdrawal method along with bank accounts back in mid-2016. The blog post read as follows:
“Thousands of Coinbase users use PayPal for their fiat currency transactions around the world. Through this integration, Coinbase users are now able to sell BTC and have their USD funds deposited to a PayPal wallet. To start, we’re offering PayPal cash-out for US users only. In the future, we hope to add support for other countries, and to support buys through PayPal as well.”
PayPal was used by a large number of customers for withdrawing money from Coinbase. It was available to Consumer as well as Pro accounts.
However, in February 2018, Coinbase announced that the integration has run into some problems.
“Over the last few weeks, USD withdrawals into PayPal accounts from Coinbase have not been operational.” Read a post on the Coinbase blog.
“Our current PayPal offering is not meeting many customers’ expectations. Our plan is to re-enable support for 2 weeks and then disable PayPal entirely until we can overhaul the entire experience.”
Two weeks later, at the end of February, Coinbase posted the following statement on their blog:
Our current PayPal offering is not meeting customers’ expectations. So, on Tuesday, February 20th, we temporarily re-enabled support for 2 weeks. We will disable PayPal entirely on Wednesday, March 7th until we can overhaul the entire experience.
PayPal integration has been disabled for over 8 months now, without any statement by the company nor any future integration plans in sight.
What does this mean for customers?
Recent statistics reported a few months ago put Coinbase’s user base at around 20 Million worldwide, with more than half of them from the United States. Coinbase has seen transactions of around $150 Billion in total. In comparison, PayPal has a user base of 244 Million active users, and has seen 7.6 Billion payments in 2017 alone, carrying a volume of more than half a trillion dollars.
PayPal controls a majority of the online payment market at around 75% well above any competitor. Almost 40% of people using banking in the US also use P2P payment apps.
These statistics just go on to show the size of the potential customer base Coinbase is not catering to. An ever-increasing number of Coinbase users face problems related to payments, especially during withdrawals. And while Coinbase is spending a lot of time and resources on fixing these problems, proper PayPal integration can take a major load off and allow for better resource allocation.
