This week the popular cryptocurrency service Coinbase revealed a slew of announcements concerning certain aspects of the business. The exchange details its Segregated Witness (Segwit) rollout, plans to disable Paypal, new tax tools, and the hiring of 500 customer support agents.
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Segwit and Taxes
Coinbase representatives Tina Bhatnagar and Zach Abrams revealed some business changes that are being applied to the San Francisco based company this year. Abrams first details the company’s support for Segwit will be complete this week. According to the product manager, Segwit compatible BTC sends and receives for all customers will soon be available.
“We are continuing to invest in our bitcoin infrastructure, and we will be working on implementing additional bitcoin scalability improvements like transaction batching and improved UTXO management,” explains Abrams.
Following the quick update on the Segwit rollout, Abrams reveals that Coinbase is releasing some tax reporting tools as well. Coinbase plans to launch the tools this week as well that make “paying taxes as easy as possible.”
“To do so, we will be providing a ‘Detailed Transactions Report’ that will accompany our Gains/Losses report,” says Coinbase.
As many customers have noted, our Gains/Losses report is only accurate if you have only bought or sold digital assets on Coinbase — So this additional, detailed report is aimed at helping those who have sent / received digital assets or bought / sold on other exchanges.
Temporarily Disabling Paypal, Credit Card Issues and 500 New Customer Service Agents
Another announcement made by the San Francisco firm is the disabling of Paypal services. On Wednesday, March 7th Coinbase plans to stop Paypal services and is “overhauling” the entire experience. The exchange does detail it will fully re-enable Paypal services at some point “later this year.” Coinbase then addresses credit card services and detailed how TD Bank announced it would not be allowing cryptocurrency purchases. TD Bank is following suit with Citi, Bank of America, Discover, and Capital One, explains the exchange, and recommends customers remove those types of cards from their platform.
“If you have a TD Bank credit card tied to your Coinbase account, we would recommend switching to a bank or debit card,” Abrams explains.
Lastly, the head of customer support at Coinbase Tina Bhatnagar has also revealed the exchange has new improvements coming soon. According to Bhatnagar Coinbase is hiring 500 agents to help with increasing capacity, upgrading tools, adding social support over the next 90 days.
“My first, and most obvious observation was that we needed more people to handle the inbound volume of support requests and a solid plan to handle any spikes in volume,” Bhatnagar details.
We will be onboarding approximately 500 agents over the next three months to handle the inbound call volume — Our first group of 90 new agents will start on March 5th and we will be adding a group of agents every week until we hit our goal of 500 in late May.
The company has grown quite large since its inception in 2012 with over $50Bn USD in cryptocurrencies traded and a total of 10Mn users in 2018. Since then the company has had seven funding rounds which raised $225.3Mn. It seems the cryptocurrency brokerage service is putting some of its capital injections to use this year.
What do you think about the announcements Coinbase has made? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Images via Shutterstock, Coinbase, Medium, and Pixabay.
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