On Thursday (1 December 2022), Coinbase said that it had to disable an important feature in the Coinbase Wallet mobile app for iOS in order to get their last app release approved by Apple’s “App Store”.
Earlier today, the Coinbase Wallet team said on Twitter:
They went on to say:
“Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system, so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee. For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible. Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system does not support crypto so we couldn’t comply even if we tried. This is akin to Apple trying to take a cut of fees for every email that gets sent over open Internet protocols.
“The biggest impact from this policy change is on iPhone users that own NFTs – if you hold an NFT in a wallet on an iPhone, Apple just made it a lot harder to transfer that NFT to other wallets, or gift it to friends or family. Simply put, Apple has introduced new policies to protect their profits at the expense of consumer investment in NFTs and developer innovation across the crypto ecosystem. We hope this is an oversight on Apple’s behalf and an inflection point for further conversations with the ecosystem. @Apple – we’re here and want to help.“
On Tuesday (29 November 2022), Coinbase said that “Coinbase Wallet“, which is its self-custody crypto wallet app, will be dropping support for four major cryptoassets — $XRP, $XLM, $ETC, and $BCH — from 1 January 2023
According to the notice posted in the help section of the Coinbase website, Coinbase Wallet will be dropping the aforementioned cryptoassets due to “low usage.”
Coinbase went on to say:
“This does not mean your assets will be lost. Any unsupported asset that you hold will still be tied to your address(es) and accessible through your Coinbase Wallet recovery phrase. In order to view or transfer these assets after January 2023, you will need to import your recovery phrase on another non-custodial wallet provider that supports these networks.”
It is important to note that Coinbase Wallet can only store “supported cryptocurrencies and access dapps on supported networks.” The Coinbase Wallet mobile app supports Ethereum and all EVM-compatible networks, as well as Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Litecoin.
Coinbase also pointed out that Coinbase Wallet supports “thousands of tokens, including all ERC-20 tokens and all tokens on EVM-compatible chains, such as Avalanche C-Chain and Polygon and that it also supports “tokens hosted on the Solana Network.”
One non-custodial crypto wallet app that Coinbase Wallet users could potentially move to is Trust Wallet (which Binance acquired in 2018).
