Please visit our new blog at https://blog.coinbase.com/

Thank you!

As part of our effort to provide world class support, we’re happy to present the re-designed Coinbase Support Center. 

Although we strive to make Coinbase easy to use, we understand that sometimes things do not work as expected or may be confusing. The Coinbase Support Center is a great place to help resolve those issues. You can:

• Report a bug
  
• Ask a question
  
• Send us feedback
  
• Message us on Live Chat
  
• Create a Coinbase Community post
  
• Peruse our robust knowledge base

We’d love to get your feedback on how you prefer to get in touch with us as Bitcoin continues to grow. Please drop by our Community and voice your opinion - we’re listening!

In our comment to the draft BitLicense last summer, we proposed changes intended to encourage a more efficient and effective regulatory structure for virtual currency businesses operating in New York. In December, the Department of Financial Services (DFS) released its revised BitLicense, which, to DFS’s well-deserved credit, accepted many of the industry’s proposed comments. But despite its improvement, the BitLicense retains two fundamental design flaws.

First, the BitLicense unnecessarily duplicates federal anti-money laundering (AML) obligations.

Federal guidance requires virtual currency exchanges (among others) to register as Money Service Businesses (MSBs) and establish risk-based AML policies in accordance with federal law. DFS should treat such businesses in the same manner it treats licensed money transmitters and simply require them to comply with existing federal law. Instead, DFS has proposed its own sweeping AML regime that requires licensees to: (i) collect the identity and physical address of any parties to a virtual currency transaction, (ii) file state-mandated activity reporting on a 24-hour deadline, and (iii) verify the identity of any customer who establishes an account, among many other requirements. Although (i) and (iii) are conditioned with vague “practicality” caveats, these requirements would appear to eliminate opportunities to establish a reasonable risk-based approach to AML programs. The result would indiscriminately force all Coinbase customers in New York to pay a toll, vis-a-vis aggressive personal disclosure and verification procedures, as a prerequisite to establishing a Coinbase account. In imposing recordkeeping and verification requirements not supported through the Bitcoin Protocol and which go far beyond what is required of money transmitters under New York or federal law, the draft Bitlicense would effectively force licensees to operate closed, proprietary virtual currency networks, thus quietly eliminating the greatest feature of the Bitcoin Protocol: its global open access.  

Second, the BitLicense unnecessarily duplicates New York’s own money transmission regulations.

As we understand it, virtual currency businesses engaging in money transmission in New York will need to acquire both a money transmission license and a BitLicense. We won’t spill more ink describing the redundancies of this dual-track construct–you can read more about them in our original comment–but as we’ve stated before, the DFS can eliminate this duplicity, inefficiency, redundancies, and ambiguity  by simply amending its money transmission regulations to add definitions for Virtual Currency and Virtual Currency Business Activity. We hope to continue working with DFS to assist in proposing appropriate, targeted amendments to existing laws or regulations which will work for the virtual currency industry.

To conclude, we understand that businesses entrusted to safe keep and transfer virtual currency on behalf of others hold special responsibilities that DFS may wish to address through a form of regulation more akin to financial services regulation than to light-touch technology regulation. But there is no need to hold virtual currency businesses to standards which far exceed those applied to money transmitters under existing state or federal law. We believe existing regulations, appropriately tweaked, give regulators the tools they need to usher fresh technology and long-overdue innovation into the well-established financial space.  

We will continue to work with DFS to provide residents of New York with the same access to useful technologies and services we provide to people all around the world.

We’re constantly looking for ways to make it easier to buy bitcoin. As part of that effort we’re excited to announce that users can now fund their Coinbase Wallet and Exchange accounts via bank wire transfer. Even better, those funds will often be available in less than an hour if sent before 3:30pm PT for most banks.

To activate the wire deposit option, simply complete level 3 verification. For now, only users in approved US states with a US bank account can use the wire deposit feature.

If you have any questions, our support team is happy to assist. You can reach us through the Coinbase Community or at Support.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Coinbase Sandbox, a dedicated test environment where merchants and developers can easily and safely test bitcoin functionality.

The Coinbase Sandbox runs on testnet3, an alternate blockchain specifically designed for testing Bitcoin functionality. It does not require the use of live Coinbase accounts or real bitcoin. Testnet bitcoin have no monetary value and are used for testing purposes only.

The Coinbase Sandbox API looks, feels, and behaves just like the actual Coinbase API, delivering an accurate and representative test environment. For more detailed information about Sandbox functionality, please visit our developer blog.

To get started, simply sign up for a Coinbase Sandbox account account and begin testing.

Last summer, we partnered with Dell to bring bitcoin payments to Dell’s customers in the United States. With nearly $60 billion in annual sales, the announcement made Dell the largest ecommerce company to officially accept bitcoin at the time.

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re working with Dell to expand bitcoin as a payment option for Dell’s customers in the United Kingdom and Canada, making Dell the largest merchant to accept bitcoin internationally.

We are pleased to partner with Dell once again as we expand bitcoin acceptance worldwide. For more information on the integration, visit http://www.dell.com/bitcoin.

Do you want to send small amounts of bitcoin to friends across the web? Buy and sell things globally with your mobile device? Collect tips on Twitch for great content? You’re in luck - there’s a Coinbase app for that. 

There is a growing array of applications built with the Coinbase API that enable you to do things that weren’t possible before Bitcoin. As a Coinbase user, you can benefit from the innovation happening in the Bitcoin world by securely connecting your Coinbase account to third party applications with the OAuth2 protocol.

Here’s a few of the most exciting apps that are currently using the Coinbase API:

ChangeTip allows you to send micropayments frictionlessly across the web. It’s a great way to show love for a comment on Reddit or introduce a friend to bitcoin on Twitter. ChangeTip allows you to link your Coinbase account and then seamlessly deposit funds within the ChangeTip user interface.

Gliph offers an easy way to buy and sell things using bitcoin. Create a listing, communicate with interested buyers, and sell your items using Gliph’s iPhone, Android or desktop apps. Gliph makes global e-commerce simple on mobile by allowing you to link your Coinbase account and start sending and receiving payments within the application.

Streamtip allows Twitch streamers to collect tips. Streamtip has over 200,000 users across the world who actively stream videos on Twitch and receive tips. Streamtip users are increasingly recognizing that connecting a Coinbase account is a great way to receive tips from a global audience.

For a broad list of Coinbase-enabled apps, visit our app gallery. If you’re a developer looking to build your own app using the Coinbase API, you can get started here.

Today, we are excited to announce that Coinbase Android and iOS apps are now available in 11 new languages.

Our mission is to make bitcoin easy to use for people across the world. As a step towards that, we have added support for the following languages:

• Spanish
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Italian
  
• Russian
  
• Portuguese
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Chinese Traditional
  
• Chinese Simplified
  

Bits Support

In addition to localizing our apps, we have also added support for bits as a unit of bitcoin currency on mobile. On both the iOS and Android apps, our users can set their preferred bitcoin currency unit by going to the settings page and selecting the “Bitcoin units” option.

Tablet Support for Android

To provide the best possible user experience on all devices, we have also optimized our Android app for tablets. Our iOS users should expect a tablet optimized experience soon.

Install The App

To try out the apps in your preferred language please visit:

Install Coinbase for Android

Install Coinbase for iOS

Let us know what you think and what you would like to see in future versions at support@coinbase.com or on Twitter. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Today we’re excited to announce support for bitcoin buy and sell functionality in the following 5 countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Norway and Croatia. Users in these countries can now link their bank account via SEPA and easily buy and sell bitcoin with euros.

Coinbase buy and sell functionality is available in 24 countries worldwide. If we don’t yet support your country, sign up on our global page to be notified when we add it.

Today we’re announcing that we’ve decided to shut down our bitcoin Tip Button. The project has seen some good usage since we launched it, with about 10,000 users accepting bitcoin tips across a variety of websites.

However, another excellent tipping service in the bitcoin community, ChangeTip, has gotten some even better traction, and done a great job at pushing the tipping ecosystem forward. So today we’d like to show our support for them and encourage existing users of our tip button to migrate over to ChangeTip.

At Coinbase, we view our core business as providing bitcoin infrastructure (secure APIs for bitcoin storage, exchange, wallets, and merchant tools). ChangeTip is an excellent example of a company which uses our APIs, and we’d like to support them instead of competing with them. Our goal is to have a thriving ecosystem of many companies in the bitcoin space building innovative applications like this.

We will be helping customers migrate to ChangeTip over the coming weeks and our Tip Button will be officially shut down on April 1st.