Is Coinbase Still The Most Reliable Cryptocurrency Trading Platform?

Coinbase is one of the biggest cryptocurrency trading platforms with a massive user base. Unfortunately, the number of complaints against it keep increasing by the day. Hardly can a week pass by without customers raising concerns about their degrading customer service.

Coinbase Crashes Often

Cryptocurrencies are defined by one main thing: volatility. While this is both their bane and boon, traders keep a close eye on the prices before they can buy or sell their coins. When the price is low, most trading websites will experience massive buying. However, when they are seriously plunging, mass sell-offs are witnessed especially with bitcoin cash. This is the time when every trader frantically tries to get rid of their coins, which is a pretty normal reaction to mitigate huge losses. Apparently, when the traffic is exceedingly high on Coinbase, their website crashes, and at times, leaves only a snapshot picture of the site. While downtimes are an expected issue when user traffic is abnormally high. Coinbase is accused of not upgrading their online services to match their ever-growing user base. When Bitcoin flopped by almost 40% of its recent high towards the end of December, so many people were looking forward to letting go some of their coins. To their shock, Coinbase announced that they would be offline for about two hours. This is just one scenario where this trading exchange hub pissed off their users. There are several other incidences as well.

Coinbase Controlling Accounts

The site has also been accused of exercising control over the money of their users; particularly those who go for vault services. If you are planning to hold your coins for long but don’t want it to be controlled, stick to cold storage methods like a paper wallet or hardware. Coinbase has the rights to limit or freeze accounts that do not operate according to their policies. Many people have witnessed account closures. Some done summarily without a warning or investigation! If you transfer your coins to a darknet or send to a gambling site, you risk account closure. Carry out such transactions directly from your offline wallet just to be safe.

New Account Verification

Coinbase can also be a pain in the butt if you are trying to open a new account. Verification and other security measures are in place to ensure the safety of its users. Some sites have less rigid requirements, though. When buying coins from this site, their price is usually around 1% higher than what they list on their dashboard at any given time. Take note of that.

Tons of Complaints

If you visit the Coinbase subreddit, you will come across tons of complaints about their services. Some are objective, and as always, others are baseless. Nevertheless, Coinbase still has a wide following thanks to their simplicity, and user-friendly interface albeit a higher fee levied.

GDAX (Coinbase Subsidary)

The site appeals to a lot of people from both inside and outside the US since it allows newbies who are testing the waters to purchase as lower units as they can afford. Some platforms like cex.io may have certain advantages over Coinbase, but you cannot purchase crypto coins below 100 Euros. If you are on Coinbase and want to move over to GDAX, the transition will be a smooth one. Coinbase founded the latter and therefore moving funds over is not charged at all. GDAX is not friendly to newbies unless you want to try out some of the sophisticated trading methods offered by the platform.

Trading More Than 20k On Coinbase

If you don’t want the IRS on your tail, don’t transact more than $20k on Coinbase. A while ago, IRS ordered this crypto coin exchange platform to surrender the names and addresses of those holding over $20k worth of cryptocurrencies to them so they could investigate cases of tax fraud. Cryptocurrencies are meant to be untraceable and unregulated. Working with Coinbase to some extent means exposing yourself to the authorities. If this is something you are comfortable with, then it’s okay to deal with Coinbase.

Other Alternatives

There aren’t many alternatives to Coinbase when buying cryptos with fiat. One exchange we do recommend looking into is Gemini, although their new user registration can be very thorough. If you still want to use Coinbase, we recommend sending your cryptos to other exchanges such as Binance to trade. If you still need help on buying alt coins, visit our guide.

Bottom Line

Coinbase has its share of flaws, as you would expect with any trading platform but it’s still one of the best platforms for nascent traders who are looking to get a pie of the disruptive cryptocurrency technology. If you can’t put up with their intermittent delays, try sites with faster transactions and a slightly lower user base.