Coinbase Wallet Finally Adds Support For BTC

By Rishma Banerjee

Coinbase, the California based cryptocurrency exchange has recently announced their plans to  they shall finally include support for Bitcoin (BTC) onto their Coinbase Wallet. This not only has created a lot of confusion amongst people in the crypto community but some are even wondering if they somehow regressed a couple of years back. None the less, this announcement does mark an important milestone for this product.

Earlier, the Coinbase Wallet used to offer support for Ethereum (ETH) and over “100,000 different ERC20 tokens and ERC721 collectibles” developed on the Ethereum platform. This update for Bitcoin support shall be launched for all users on the iOS and Android, next week.

Their official blog post read,

“Our goal with Coinbase Wallet is to create the world’s leading user-custodied crypto wallet […] Adding support for Bitcoin is an important next step in that direction,” later adding, “We’re also working on support for Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and other popular cryptocurrencies.”

The general confusion regarding the whole issue is why this major wallet didn’t support the largest cryptocurrency by market cap during its initial launch. Several comments were posted on their twitter page with people asking what year it is and figs from Back to the Future being used as reaction posts.

Although, the company has provided the explanation that,

“the Coinbase Wallet app is Coinbase’s user-controlled cryptocurrency wallet. With Coinbase.com, you can buy crypto and Coinbase stores it (along with your private keys) for you; with Coinbase Wallet, you store your own crypto (safeguarded by a private key that only you know.)”

Up till August 2019, the Coinbase Wallet was previously known as Toshi, which was developed and launched by the Coinbase team during 2017. When the product initially launched, it featured the world’s very first mobile DApp (decentralized applications) browser and later became the first wallet to launch crypto collectibles.

Other the massive confusion amongst its users at Coinbase’s expense, the team has also revealed plans for including support for  PayPal withdrawals for all European customers and customers involved with European Free Trade Association countries, such as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

The announcement also states,

“Before PayPal, SEPA [Single Euro Payments Area] and UK Faster Payments were the only options for European customers to withdraw funds […] As one of the world’s easiest and most widely-used payment platforms, adding PayPal as a withdrawal option for European customers offers another great option for withdrawing their funds.”