Coinbase Drops XRP & Other Tokens, Cites Low Activity

As the FTX saga continues, all eyes are on crypto exchanges: Coinbase, Crypto.com, Binance and the like all have hefty sets of eyes on their next moves.

There is plenty to be said for the state of crypto exchanges today, but Coinbase’s announcement of the delisting of several tokens: BCH, ETC, XLM, and XRP. Let’s dive into the state of crypto exchanges currently, and more on Coinbase’s latest announcement.

Exchange: Status Check

While Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao has seized the spotlight as crypto’s ‘main character’ lately, Crypto.com’s leadership team – spearheaded by CEO Kris Marszalek – has largely been on the defensive, while Coinbase has been treading their steady positioning. Plenty of other major headlining exchanges have followed suit with Coinbase. Many have sought to maintain posture and look to keep ‘business as usual’ to weather the storm.

Nonetheless, the spotlight is on. As more threads unravel around the FTX saga, consumer trust is impacted in immeasurable ways; one consistent thread is that all exchanges, the aforementioned 3 and beyond, have faced pressures to increase transparency around reserves.

That could lead to exchanges at large preparing for increased regulatory oversight, particularly with the U.S. Senate hearing regarding FTX less than 48 hours away.

XRP is frequently a top 10 token in biggest market cap in crypto; however, Coinbase has elected to no longer support trading of the token, citing "low activity." | Source: XRP-USD on TradingView.com

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Coinbase’s Delisting

We haven’t seen a delisting from Coinbase in recent memory. In a tweet announcement earlier on Tuesday, Coinbase announced the token delisting:

1/3: After careful evaluation, we will be removing support for several networks with low activity on Coinbase Wallet starting in January 2023—including BCH, ETC, XLM & XRP. These routine evaluations allow us to continue investing in new features that make web3 more accessible.

— Coinbase Wallet 🛡️ (@CoinbaseWallet) November 29, 2022

Coinbase, once notorious for being too lenient on their coin adoption policy, is tightening the belt and cutting the fat. The move may surprise those that pay attentive to tokens not named Bitcoin and Ethereum. XRP is generally seen as a low-cost token that is easy for cross-exchange swaps with it’s low fees. Similar sentiment is often shared with fellow delisted token Stellar (XLM), and both tokens typically sit in the top 25-50 in terms of biggest tokens by market cap – making them surprising cuts considering some of the more fringe, lesser-known tokens that Coinbase has listed previously.

The final two tokens, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) are both the result of forks and will be recognizable to more legacy crypto users who can recall when these tokens came into existence as early ‘forked coins’. Their stagnant performance and slow retraction of relevance has led to an unsurprising result with this announcement.

Users impacted should refer to Coinbase’s blog post on the matter for more details.

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Featured image from Coinbase.com/press, Charts from TradingView.com
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