A prominent Dogecoin community member by the name of Mishaboar warned crypto users not to rally behind exchange CEOs whose sole motive is ‘profit and power’, following Coinbase Commerce’s decision to cease support for native Litecoin, Bitcoin and Dogecoin payments.
Coinbase Commerce product lead, Lauren Dowling, shared clarification over the weekend underlining the reasons for the change.
Coinbase Payments no longer supports native #Bitcoin, #Dogecoin, #Litecoin payments because it was “too challenging” without smart contracts. Only users with a Coinbase account will be able to pay using UTXO-based coins. Coinbase payments is Coinbase’s payment gateway which… https://t.co/xHmE63YtDF
— Mishaboar (@mishaboar) February 19, 2024
Dowling claims that in response to apparent consumer demand, an on-0chain payments protocol built on EVM technologies was created, supposedly freeing the operational and financial burdens of the original system.
The new Commerce product requires details of every on-chain payment, supports a number of native assets (ERC-20) across Base, Polygon and Ethereum, and automatically converts payments to USDC on-chain.
Customers can pay using self-custody EVM wallets with native assets including wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum L2. Assets in Coinbase account can also be used to pay, including Bitcoin, Litecoin and Doge.
Dowling noted that implementing these functions on the Bitcoin blockchain without smart contracts and stablecoins was impossible, hence the decision to remove native Bitcoin and other UTXO support.
However, the decision was met with criticism and disappointment in the crypto community, especially among holders of these coins. Mishaboar expressed his disappointment with Coinbase, which owes much of its success to these massively successful OG coins.
As I said countless times: exchanges are not your friends. Never rally behind folks like @brian_armstrong or other exchange CEOs: they are just businessmen without interest for cryptocurrencies but only for profit and power over the market. They cannot be advocates for the most important promises of the tech, which are decentralization, permissionlessness, and privacy.
The news came a day after Binance concluded the delisting of Monero (XMR), a leading privacy-oriented coin in crypto with no small amount of good-will from the original cypherpunk community. The disconcerting events highlight how centralised exchanges are not necessarily on-side when it comes to financial privacy. Beyond that, Monero enthusiasts by the pseudonym Untraceable pointed out potential foul play from the exchange, which obliged users to sell XMR rather than withdraw funds prior to the delisting.
Meanwhile, anticipation for Dogecoin’s upgrade by February 27 is on the rise, with Dogecoin Core v1.14.7 containing a number of useful fixes and updates. In a recent blog post, the Dogecoin Foundation highlighted its focus for 2024, which included enhancing existing projects using initiatives such as DogeBox, as well as expanding the team and community engagement.
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