In a significant development, Brian Armstrong, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, announced an 82% reduction in unnecessary account freezes, a problem that the company has been grappling with for an uncomfortably long period.
This announcement came on June 6th, where Armstrong recognized the issue of account freezes as a persistent problem and a matter of utmost priority for the company to rectify.
He stated, “We’ve managed to decrease the issue by 82% as of now, with additional improvements in the pipeline. We promise to keep our customers posted on further advancements.”
Armstrong also encouraged customers with frozen accounts to reach out to Coinbase Support for assistance. Account restrictions have been a point of contention for Coinbase users over the years, with many reporting abrupt freezes lasting several months, prompting them to leave the platform.
This progress is attributed to Dor Levi, a member of Coinbase’s product team, who joined the company nine weeks ago with the specific task of addressing the account freeze issue. Levi has been instrumental in making “significant investments” in Coinbase’s machine learning models and infrastructure.
However, Levi admitted that the user experience surrounding account restrictions still falls short of his expectations.
Despite these improvements, Coinbase will continue to enforce account restrictions as mandated by court orders and sanctions to maintain legal compliance.
Customer trust was also recently shaken by a significant data breach that revealed the details of over 70,000 customer accounts. The company is now making efforts to enhance its security measures, particularly after some of its overseas customer service agents were bribed to access sensitive customer information.
Despite these setbacks, Coinbase remains one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, boasting over 100 million users and being the largest custodian of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
