Two-thirds of people using Coinbase are willing to leave the exchange after reports that the exchange plans to sell data of user to two government agencies for $250,000. John Rager as Cryptocurrency trader and analyst executed a poll on Twitter, asking his 73,000 followers: “Would you delete or stop using your Coinbase account?”
Over 5,000 people replied, and 66% of them said they would take out of the regulated exchange. The remaining 33% are willing to stay. The exchange platform store thousands of personal user information in compliance with US policies.
Coinbase is in difficulty after reports came out at the weekend alleging that the exchange is selling a blockchain tool that provides government agencies with superior analytical capabilities.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to buy licenses from the exchange’s analytics tool called Coinbase Analytics.
In one of the documents published in April, the IRS points out the relationship between Neutrino and Coinbase Analytics. Neutrino is a blockchain surveillance platform acquired by Coinbase in 2019. It allows to analysis and track of cryptocurrency flows across multiple blockchains that criminals are currently using.
Otherwise, the DEA points out that Coinbase Analytics provides investigators with identity attribution and anonymities crypto addresses domestically and internationally. Coinbase refuse it is selling user data. A company official said that “all data in our analytics tool is fully sourced from publicly available data, and does not consit of any personally identifiable information.”
But frequent outages during periods of bitcoin’s pump, high transaction fees as well as other privacy concerns have made thousands of Coinbase users to face difficulties. The exchange has also previously shared data of 14,000 users who traded $20,000 worth of crypto or more with the IRS.
In the John Rager poll, some investors showed they have become disapointed with the Coinbase.
“Honestly, I think there is no a good reason to use it anymore, outside of name recognition. There are many better exchanges for onboarding and better options for trading,” opined @_realPaulRyan.
One @Flat railed: “I’m in the 66% and stopped using Coinbase 3 years ago. Fees are an absolute ripoff. Always down when price moves. Absolute joke. Why on earth anyone would use them is beyond me.”
So, What do you think about Coinbase? Would you stop using Coinbase or willing to leave it?
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