Coinbase Insolvent? | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase Insolvent?

26 pointscobookman22 comments

Everyone who wired money out of Coinbase from December 12-15th has yet to get their funds.

Is this due to Coinbase having a lack of usd on hand?

I am not sure if they are solvent or not, but I genuinely believe that they bit off more than they could chew with Bitcoin Cash. The volume of transactions surprised them, I think, and they've been struggling to keep up ever since.

Additionally, of course, by adding BCH all of a sudden they may have triggered a bank run on themselves since so many people potentially wanted to move their BCH out or cash out. Not to mention that by nature of the fork, value was created out of the existing BTC holdings so there would not necessarily be fiat funds to back up those amounts, only the BTC amounts.

I think the combination of these factors have led to delays and payout limbo.

Note: Not blaming BCH for their problems here - perhaps more Coinbase themselves in the way they handled the new asset.

What you said does not make sense for an exchange. For every seller, there needs to be a buyer who first deposits USD.

They would get into trouble if they tried to play market maker.

Ya but with BCH, being a hard fork where the asset was created from everything to a certain block of the BTC chain, it effectively created new coin balances out of nothing. Now imagine when people start trying to cash those out to fiat.

In this situation, there was no fiat laid out to get it but it is indeed worth fiat in the case of a withdrawal.

No.

If people want to cash out their BCH, they need to sell it on the exchange for USD. The USD needs to already exist in the exchange for someone to buy it. The fiat was laid out by the buyer.

So there's no fundamental liquidity issue, if everyone wanted to cash out their BCH to fiat it should not be an issue.

Normally, yes. But if you sell it through coinbase and not gdax, cb let's you sell it instantly and acts as a buyer.

How do you know they're acting as a buyer and not just creating a sell order on GDAX?

Because they just bought it from you at that guaranteed price. They could go and sell it on the market for more/less, but the price you sold it to CB for remains the same.

That price changes dynamically at some interval, and is discounted against the trading market value, correct?

They do update that price frequently (minutes, maybe seconds) and there is a premium added to the price. I assume they add this premium so they can then go liquidate it for profit on the exchange as needed.

That doesn't sound to you like they're just selling it on gdax?

They can do whatever they want with it after they have sold it to me for a fixed price.

Heh, I'm not sure why you think its a fixed price. They're probably showing you the lowest sell order on the order book.

Have you ever bought/sold on CB? It is exactly that, a fixed price. It's the convenience you pay for to use CB. That price updates frequently, but whatever price you execute at is the price you pay/sell for.

I recently withdrew some money out of Coinbase and it took about 8 working days.

On another note -- I just posted this on HN but I just tried to send 2x €150,- to another Bitcoin address and Coinbase only sent €25,- (despite having enough funds on my account). I was also charged 2x €10,- in the process. I contacted Coinbase support to hopefully get the refund of my transaction fees since it is obviously an error.

Maybe it was sucked up in miners fees?

I purchased BTC, ETH, and LTC on coinbase after those dates and received my funds in the respective currencies. Are you referring to cash out to USD into a bank?

Does it matter? They're FDIC insured.

Only for those in the USA.

I moved money out of CB on the 22nd and it's in my bank account now.

who is everyone? sources?

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