Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, has announced it will be making a number of significant improvements to the product experience.
Coinbase to Roll Out Portfolio Balance
As the crypto-space matures and more exchanges enter this growing market, competition tends to encourage product innovation and enhancement. With this in mind, Coinbase has overhauled buy and sell flows to improve the product experience.
Over the next few weeks, the exchange will start rolling out Portfolio Balance so that users are able to track their portfolio and its performance over time. Showing historical balances is only the first of many improvements the company wishes to make in name of user experience.
The functionality will initially be added to the web platform, then followed with Android and iOS. A tool that monitors the digital asset portfolio has been one of their most requested features, according to Coinbase.
According to the statement, a customer’s portfolio value represents the fiat equivalent of all cryptocurrency and fiat holdings on Coinbase at any given moment in time.
“So your balance will go up as you invest more on Coinbase or as your assets increase in value. Portfolio Balance does not show gains and losses. Since Coinbase enables customers to send and receive digital assets, we do not currently have an accurate cost basis for all holdings.”
The inability to provide accurate cost basis for all holdings is due to the same issue that makes it difficult for Coinbase to generate automated tax reports.
Over the coming months, the exchange will unveil more tools “like showing gains and losses on specific Coinbase investments and viewing historical balances for individual assets”.
Coinbase Winds Down Multisig Vaults
Coinbase introduced multisig vaults in late 2014 to add extra safety for users. Customers find value in them in order to manage their private keys and control their own security, while using the exchange’s interface. Coinbase, however, will end this feature on April 19, 2018 as “complexity of multisig vaults makes it infeasible to support multisig withdrawals for each additional forked asset”.
Customers using multisig vaults can move funds with the two keys they control. The winding down of the feature will result in customers not being able to access the third key that Coinbase controls. The company recommends customers to withdraw all funds from a multisig vault before the referred date in case they have no access to the two keys they already control.