Coinbase has within the last week or two really made a big push into people using their wallet app. While at first I was pretty excited to use it as having all of my stuff under one house would be nice its quickly become a nightmare.
Coinbase has always had pretty high fees and I hated them but they also were so easy to use and so very secure. I also live in Texas and Binance is not available in my state yet so that further pushed me into Coinbase's arms. To me the wallet showed great promise as again it was super easy to use so it was going to be pretty hard for me to mess up. Where they got me and anybody else though is in the fee's and the crazy premium they put on using Compound on their app.
At first I thought it was the wallet that was just fee packed in the first place but that quickly faded away. Where they get you is not by sending or receiving crypto to your wallet it is by using the lending apps within the wallet itself. To make it easy I decided to try and lend out the 20 DAI I had in my wallet to both Compound and dXdY the miner fee for this was 0.018 Eth or a little over $8. However when I immediately tried again with sending it back to the Coinbase Exchange it was 0.05 Eth or about $2.50 which while still expensive let me move it to a place it could earn interest.
This might finally be the breaking point for me where I decide to start sending my crypto to something like Nexo or Celsius to earn interest. As much as I would like to keep everything together and in one place Coinbase prices out a small player like myself. I am sure if I was moving hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of crypto at a time it would not matter at all to me but moving 20-50 at a time makes this unsustainable.
Overall this "adventure" cost me 0.5 DAI and the 0.05 Eth to get back to where I had begun. It did show me though it was time to move on from Coinbase wallet and really to leave what I already have in there ( I do have some 0x and DAI already in Compound). This is pretty disappointing to say the least as I want to participate in lending by using platforms like Compound. I prefer all my Compound though to be in one place and these fees have killed off that idea since its not worth taking out what I already have lent via the Coinbase wallet. While not the end of the world it is a huge pain to have assets in the same pool spread across multiple wallets. Hopefully Coinbase will change the way their wallet functions and allow you to chose the amount of gas you pay so that if you want it low priority they will allow it however thats not the case now. It is apparent that they have users locked up in high priority and still pay some sort of fee on top of it. We can only hope they continue to invest and change the wallet allowing for more functions.
If you are interested in further supporting me I still have a couple spots available in all my Coinbase Earn referrals! I will attach them below! Just a few days ago they added a Compound referral!
EOS here
Stellar Lumins (XLM) here
Compound here
If you do not have the Brave Browser join the new wave of web surfing security and again please use my referral code when you decide to download here!
