Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s co-founder and its current CEO, has confirmed Coinbase Wallet is to remove decentralized apps (dapps) functionality.

Coinbase to dapp devs: blame Apple. Dec 2019

Their dapp browser is a bit like that of Status’ ethereum browser where you connect to the blockchain through the app and thus can access all the dapps.

“This is really unfortunate to see,” Armstrong publicly said, “Apple seems to be eliminating usage of Dapps from the App Store.” He further added:

“If Apple customers want to be able to use Dapps, we may need to make this request know to Apple in some way.

This is an important area of innovation in finance, and many developers and early adopters of this technology have millions of dollars worth of crypto tied up in these financial applications, which they will no longer be able to use on Apple mobile devices if this app store policy continues.”

This puzzling decision followed certain recent moves by Google where they apparently by mistake removed hundreds of crypto videos on Youtube and further removed MetaMask from the Android store.

Google and Apple dominate the mobile software market with the two being a duopoly that almost totally controls just what app can be downloaded on Android and iOS phones.

This coordinated approach by both suggests the US government might be involved as it is difficult to see why either would take such decision at this particular time.

The rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) may have gained the attention of regulators who might have pressured these two companies like they did last year.

Alternatively, Apple might see the Dapp browser as a competitor to the app store, but in the grand scheme of things dapps are still a fairly small area with neither announcing any new policy.

So our guess would be some stealth pressure by the US government to limit the rise of dapps which – especially where decentralized exchanges are concerned – they might think them either illegal or close enough to it to pressure this sort of corporate enforcement action by the state.

That said, it is worth pointing out there is no concrete evidence it is the state, but it is difficult to see what else it would be.

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