Coinbase Wallet Is Dropping Support For XRP, BCH, XLM And ETC

Users lose interest in some cryptocurrencies as negative news about them spreads in specialized and mainstream media. At least, that is what Coinbase thinks, as they will soon stop supporting some tokens with a lot of trajectory among crypto enthusiasts.

On November 23, Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., announced that its wallet will stop supporting XRP, BCH, XLM, and ETC due to poor customer usability.

Coinbase Cares About Usage, Not Tradition

According to Coinbase, January 23 will be the deadline for users to view and transfer their tokens to another wallet provider. They will then have to import their recovery phrases to the new wallet to use their assets.

The Coinbase Wallet comes preconfigured to work with the following networks: Arbitrum, Avalanche C-Chain, BNB Chain, Gnosis Chain, Fantom Opera, Optimism, Polygon, xDai, and Solana. In addition, it supports all Ethereum-compatible networks and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (PVM).

Formerly one of the top 3 cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem, XRP came to have a vast “army” of fans dominating all of Crypto Twitter. However, Ripple’s legal battle against the SEC has led most of its community to abandon their previous engagement. It currently sits on the seventh spot on the list of cryptocurrencies with the most market capitalization.

XRP was one of the most promising tokens in recent years due to its speed in processing payments, allowing up to 50,000 transactions per second worldwide, regardless of the size of the transactions.

Although right now the XRP community is far from being the euphoric crowd behind the XRP Army, there is still a group of XRP enthusiasts interacting on social media. If Ripple wins the case against the SEC, XRP might recover both the market capitalization it lost and its thousands of users and die-hard fans.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) were created by one of Ripple’s cofounders as a more open alternative with a different business model. It is number 25 on Coinmarketcap’s list.

Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin created after the failure of the New York Agreements, where miners and developers tried to reach a consensus about the implementation of Segwit and the size of the blocks. The coin, mainly promoted by Roger Ver, failed to gain momentum and has dropped to the 26th spot on the list of most valuable cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum Classic was also born after a fork. However, this chain was the original —the forked and most popular was what we currently know as Ethereum. It was created after the chain split in two to deal with the effects of the famous hack on The DAO. It is crypto #23 on the Top 100 of the most valuable cryptocurrencies.

Retail Investors Prefer BTC Over Altcoins

As reported by Cryptopotato, retail investors are investing heavily in Bitcoin despite all the negative news surrounding the crypto market. The FTX bankruptcy and the collapse of Terra LUNA were the most significant examples of bad news affecting the whole industry.

However, Glassnode states that wallets holding less than 1 BTC have added about 86.2K BTC to their holdings since the FTX bankruptcy. This has been the most prominent “peak balance increase ever,” reaching more than 1.21 million BTC, equal to 6.3% of the circulating BTC supply.

Therefore, the low usability of cryptocurrencies removed from the Coinbase Wallet may be due to the fact that new and small investors are becoming more conscious when investing their money and prefer to avoid risking their money on altcoins or meme coins.