Coinbase has had a bumpy ride this year. The leading cryptocurrency exchange today announced the introduction of the Market Maker Program which aims to reward users for diversifying their activities across a wide set of trading pairs on the platform.
According to the official release, the program would reward the qualifying exchange clients with access to new pricing tiers. To fulfill the criteria for Coinbase Market Maker Program, a user must trade above a certain threshold in the trailing 30 days adjusted maker volume score [AMV]. Specifically, to meet the requirement for the program in December this year, the minimum AMV is $500m.
Coinbase further noted,
“The program is designed to offer rewards to participants including, but not limited to, top tier trading rates. If you qualify, your account will be updated, and you will be notified once new pricing rates go into effect.”
Moreover, the structure of the program may change over time and may include changes in the threshold adjusted maker volume score required for qualification, categorization of which trading pairs are considered low, med, and high liquidity. In addition to that, the program may also include associated multipliers for low, med, and high liquidity trading pairs in the adjusted maker volume score.
However, this did not sit well with the community members as many questioned the platform’s customer service experience. This comes after Bitcoin briefly crossed its highly anticipated all-time high, following which Coinbase reported that it was experiencing delays processing BTC withdrawals due to Bitcoin network congestion.
Previously Coinbase has suffered a number of issues, most of which were outages especially during busy trading periods over the last several months. The latest issue was when Bitcoin climbed above the $19.7K. While this has marked as “resolved” the community members were far from satisfied.
Coinbase’s high transaction fee is yet another bone of contention. Many users have alleged not only inefficiencies with regards to the website but also the maker and taker fees. In response to this, Coinbase announced updating its fee structure and claimed to have reduced taker and maker fees for customers trading in certain pricing tiers.
Its tweet read:
“It’s our goal to make interacting with crypto as seamless and user friendly as possible. By being transparent about our fees, it’s our hope that we will empower our customers with the information they need to make informed decisions that best suit their respective needs.”
Despite this, several users on the platform remained unimpressed. Here’s a snapshot of it:
It could take a while for Coinbase to be back in the community good books especially after the whole New York Times story in which 23 former employees of the platform shared their experience highlighting alleged repeating instances of discrimination against the company’s black employees.
Prior to this exposé, Coinbase released a statement of its own in a bid to alleviate the situation that would have triggered severe bad press and with the possibility of painting an inaccurate picture that lacks complete information and context.