The top U.S. cryptocurrency exchange's wallet will no longer support BCH, ETC, XLM and XRP due to "low usage."
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Coinbase has announced that it will drop support of four old and well-known cryptocurrencies for its wallet: Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, Stellar Lumens and Ripple's XRP.
In a note on its website, Coinbase said that as of Jan. 23, 2023, its Coinbase Wallet will no longer support the tokens and their networks "due to low usage."
After that date, it will be possible to move those assets onto another wallet, but it will require use of a Coinbase recovery phrase.
It warns, in bold type:
"Sending or receiving unsupported assets through Coinbase Wallet will cause you to lose them."
This delisting only refers to the Coinbase Wallet, and not to Coinbase.com or the Coinbase Exchange app.
Big Names
In the case of the first three, what makes the delistings news is their size and history.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) are old forks of the two largest cryptocurrencies, which split in 2017 and 2016 respectively due to schisms in the mining and node running communities.
Stellar Lumens (XLM) was something similar, launched in 2014 by XRP developer Jed McCaleb after he split with cross-border payments firm Ripple.
BCH was created as a result of a split over whether to increase Bitcoin’s block size in order to make it more scalable — able handle more transactions per second — to make it a better payments token.
ETC came about after a fork was created to cancel out the effects of a $50 million hack, which some community members said was wrong as it amounted to changing the blockchain — setting what they called a terrible precedent.
But these cryptocurrencies have seen their stars fade in the last couple of years as the native tokens of smart-contract blockchains competing with Ethereum like BNB, Cardano and Polkadot gained ground.
XRP remains a top 10 token with a market capitalization of $19.8 billion as of Nov. 29. It is the seventh-largest cryptocurrency as well as the eighth-most-traded, with a 24-hour volume of $927 million.
Despite that, trading on the token — widely known as "Ripple" because of its close links to the cross-border payments firm — has been suspended for almost two years on Coinbase and on many other U.S. exchanges.
That's because Ripple is locked in an ongoing legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It's a closely watched case in the crypto industry as it amounts to a test case of the regulator's claim that virtually all cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin are securities.
If the SEC wins, any U.S. exchanges listing it could be hit with a lawsuit for selling securities without a broker-dealer license.
And while the SEC can do that at any time, the concern was that it would do that particularly in the case of XRP as the lawsuit specifically classified the token as a security.
On Jan. 19, 2021, Coinbase joined many other top U.S. exchanges in suspending trading of XRP.
