During the crypto winter, companies were finding innovative ways to attract new investors, and the main strategy was to make investing easier. For this, companies like Coinbase and Balance were competing to launch newer features. Most of them had the intended consequences as these companies were able to attract new investors and keep their revenue up in an attempt to stay afloat. Recently one of those products, Coinbase bundle, was shut down quietly, without a formal explanation from the company.
What’s the bundle?
The Coinbase bundle was hailed as a means to simplify investing in crypto. Each bundle was a mix of five coins, Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Ethereum Classic (ETC). The proportion of each coin in a bundle was decided based on the size of each coin’s market capitalization in USD. The main attraction was the fact that the smallest bundle was sold as low as $25 dollar. However, a closer look reveals that if you’d put $100 into Coinbase Bundle in 2017, a year later you’d have just over $20.
The Closure
The exchange notified bundle users: “Coinbase Bundle purchases have been deprecated, as such all assets purchased in the Coinbase Bundle have been redistributed to their respective individual asset wallets.” While users will not be able to use the Coinbase bundle as a standalone entity for their purchases, the amount of crypto purchased as part of the plan will be reflected in their individual wallet. Even though the bundle has been shut down, users can still buy all of the coins that were included in the bundle in similar proportion, so it won’t really affect investor in a really negative way.
For those investors who still want services similar to bundle, Gemini exchange offers a product called Cryptoverse which is tied to a basket of cryptocurrencies. Just after the launch of the bundle the exchange had closed an index fund focused on institutional investors. Coinbase cited a lack of interest for the closure. Recently, they have launched yet another product, which lets new investors copy the top 10 percent of Coinbase traders. It is yet another attempt to simplify the cryptocurrency buying process, but with such a closure and unreliability Coinbase is risking its credibility. In the future, investors will be unwilling to try their products.
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