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Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)
I work with Ukrainians and paying some of them has been a challenge, so we decided to give payment via BTC a try. I got a personal Coinbase account to play around with it, to get more familiar (I had never purchase any crypto until then). Once I got the account and proved to myself that it should work, I started the process to get a business account.
The business account took a long time to get. Probably 2 months. The amount of information they asked for was quite surprising to me. As a founder, I had never given this level of detail to anyone for any purpose. I assumed that it was due to regulations Coinbase were under, but honestly, I do not know. The end goal was important enough that I was willing to go along.
Once I went through the onerous process, I linked our business checking and purchased some BTC and tried to transfer it. I was told there would be a 13 day hold on the funds before they could be transferred to my consultant. I went through support and was told to use a debit card and there would be no hold.
Since I didn't have a debit card, I had to get one. After it came, I tried to add it and I got the error: An error occurred / Business cards are not supported.
That was in mid-December. Here we are in late January and it is still not resolved. Here's a thumbnail of what has happened in between:
- I submitted an email ticket, where they sent me canned responses for the first week or so. They really never seem to understand the issue.
- After a few weeks they finally told me I had a personal account and I couldn't add a business debit card.
- I showed them screengrabs of my account proving that it was a business account.
At this point they ghosted me.
A week ago I tried a chat on the website. I explained everything above and it came down to this:
> A person can only have either a personal or business account, but not both
Let's ignore the fact that they let me open both accounts and never said a word about it. They even let me connect a debit card to my personal account and a checking account to my business account.
Next, they told me if I deleted my personal account I could add the debit card to my business account. I did that. No change.
I started a chat again and after a long time bumped it up a level and said someone would get in touch with me via email.
Yesterday I got an email that my new ticket was closed and asked if my issue was resolved.
At this point, I deleted my personal account and my business account is stuck in "personal" mode and I can't add a debit card, so the hold time means it's useless.
I just want people to know that Coinbase is a complete joke of a company. Don't use them.
- rdxm 4y ago[dead]
- therein 4y agoI recommend Kraken, especially for corporate accounts. They actually have real support that cares. While I was trying to set up my account they kept asking for more and more information into the corporate structure. I told them "guys, this is just a corporate account, we are going to be trading a limited balance, this is not a market maker, why are you asking us as if we are going to be trading millions monthly". They actually empathized and proceeded to open the account without ridiculous scrutiny.
- e40 4y agoThis is likely what I will do, even if they resolve the issue.
- madsbuch 4y agoA couple of things: 1. Banks a notoriously bad working with Crypto exchanges. A lot of credit/debit card simply does not work. 2. Prefer DAI/USDT/USDC over BTC. Stable coins appear to be what you actually want in your situation. 3. Run it on polygon or another L2 to get cheaper gas fees. 4. There are several much easier ways to acquire dem – try looking through the options provided by your metamask wallet.
- nailer 4y agoRe: 2 and 3. I'd stick to USDC over USDT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-whuXHSL1Pg&t=194s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-whuXHSL1Pg&t=194s. USDC still has capitalisation statements. USDT doesn't. Eth is indeed slow and expensive, but more people (as in: active wallets) use Solana (a fast and cheap layer 1) than the any of the eth layer 2s these days. Coinbase staff have been caught front running their customers on new tokens listings multiple times now, even after they promised to actively stop it. Whatever's going on in Japan is going on in Japan. Don't trust other people with custody of your funds.