Bitcoin wallet and exchange Coinbase today announced its plan to discontinue its Bitcoin tipping services effective April 1st this year.
As stated in the company’s blog, the reason behind their sudden withdrawal from micro tipping business is ChangeTip — another bitcoin tipping service which has been constantly ruling the market. In Coinbase’s own words, the latter has got “some better traction and done a great job at pushing the tipping ecosystem forward.”
Coinbase further announced that it would encourage its existing tipping customers base — around 10,000 individuals — to move to ChangeTip. “We’d like to support them instead of competing with them,” stated the company’s blog while describing how ChangeTip is one of the excellent companies to have been using Coinbase APIs (for BTC storage, merchant tools, wallets, etc.)
In some of the Reddit comments, users posited a few other reasons behind the Coinbase Tip Button closure, saying that it was only a “strict business decision rather than supporting a community and another company [ChangeTip].” Coinbase official Charles Lee meanwhile accepted that that continuing with the tipping services could have wasted their company’s resources against other core focuses.
This is, in fact, true. Coinbase recently had a lot on its plate — a $75 million investment, followed by the launch of a new “allegedly” licensed US exchange, further followed by a phishing attack, etc. Considering tipping services are literally profiting off pennies, Coinbase’s decision to roll out actually makes sense. The company has just announced that it will expand its Bitcoin Buy/Sell services to Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Norway as well.