Coinbase offends just about everyone by adding XRP to Coinbase Pro

By Tim Copeland

You can’t please everyone. Though plenty of XRP holders were ecstatic at the news yesterday that, at long last, Coinbase was finally listing the coin, reaction among crypto twitter influencers ranged from disgust to charges of insider trading.

Insider trading charges are, of course, leveled every time an exchange lists a coin, and with one as powerful as XRP, the third-largest by market cap, you could hear the howls of outrage ringing from one end of the Internet to the other. One of the better tweetstorms, complete with charts showing the usual pre-listing bump, was via the Crypto Twitter phenom, Crypto Bitlord, an anonymous Australian with some 90,000 followers.  His back-of-the-envelope analysis is here.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal pointed out that the pump was short lived and that listings like this don’t indicate any lasting trend. So far, it has declined from $0.33 to $0.32—a third of the original pump.

Crypto people, being a naturally skeptical bunch, assumed that Ripple paid Coinbase to list XRP. That is actually a reasonable hunch since many exchanges do in fact try to extract revenue for listings.  Crypto investor Alistair Milne reached out to Elliott Suthers, director of communications at Coinbase, and screenshot Suthers’s somewhat suspicious “happy to discuss this off the record” reply.

Meanwhile, Brian Hoffman, project lead OpenBazaar, pointed out that Coinbase seemed to be rewarding the XRP Army for its ruthless and occasionally bullying behavior. “Their spam bots are the biggest scourge in social media,” he tweeted.

WhalePanda—an anonymous angel investor—put the recent move in a string of “bad” decisions for Coinbase. Whalepanda pointed to Coinbase’s widely-criticized move of adding an option for users to store their private keys on Google Drive, among other things.

Anonymous Bitcoin supporter Phil used the news to take a quick dig at XRP, implying that it is still in a “regulatory gray area.” This is in reference to the idea that it is a security by U.S. law—a feature of two lawsuits directly at the company Ripple. Eric Conner, founder of Ethhub, joined in by asking, if Coinbase is going to list XRP, it might as well list Dentacoin—a struggling altcoin and the butt of many jokes.

Even Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong jumped into the fray, but then thought better of it. Hours after all the hoop-de-doo, at around 8:30 PM Monday, he tweeted a laughing emoji—then deleted it 10 minutes later. Perhaps it was unrelated.

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