WhalePanda is a well-known trader, blogger and market commentator in the cryptcurrency community. In fact, his standing among crypto traders earned him one of the most influential people in cryptocurrencies last year on Coindesk.
Yet, it seems that not even his standing in the community allowed him to escape recent fund lockups at Coinbase.
In a tweet that was sent out today, WhalePanda made his concerns known. He also threatened to sue Coinbase and tagged the CEO, Brian Armstrong.
Update on @coinbase SEPA Withdrawal: Still nothing, no reply from support. On /r/coinbase you can find 100's of posts by people missing withdrawals from the 12th. Don't know what went wrong that day, but it looks really bad. I'm close to taking legal action @brian_armstrong.
— WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) January 4, 2018
Problematic Delays
The fact that WhalePanda requested his payment through a SEPA transfer is also worrying. SEPA payments are the EUs harmonised payment routing method that usually clears transactions in 2-3 days.
The withdrawal request was put through on the 12th of December which is almost three weeks ago. Moreover, WhalePanda appears to only be one of a handful of traders with similar complaints.
Many are wondering if the delayed payments is as a result of the massive surge in demand that Coinbase experienced during December. Hence, the issue could just be capacity constraints at Coinbase.
Coinbase Silent
What is more disconcerting for most users including WhalePanda is that there has been no communication from the team at Coinbase. The Coinbase subreddit has had no responses from over 100 users. WhalePanda said:
There has been no statement on this obviously big issue, which makes it even more shady
For example, the top post in this subreddit who claimed that the $50,000 that he had wired was still stuck in limbo and that all requests he has put in for direct contact had been ignored.
This is particularly strange as Coinbase has usually been quite responsive in their Reddit forums when there have been customer concerns in the past. The silence is deafening to anxious traders.
The picture does not get much better on their other social channels. For example, the last post on the company twitter account goes over the process of lisiting a digital asset.
Indeed, this is quite ironic giving the botched Bitcoin Cash rollout in the middle of December last year. This led to many accusations of insider trading at Coinbase as the price of BCH swung wildly.
What Can be Done?
It was issues like this that convinced Coinbase to increase their support staff and implement dedicated phone lines. They went on a hiring spree towards the end of the year to deal with this.
However, it seems as if this has not yet filtered through and periods like this, when traders have to wait for their money, can be the most frustrating and damaging.
Given that these payments relate to requests that were put through on the 12th of December, one can only hope that the issue is an internal glitch that is being corrected.
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