Coinbase Expands US Debit Card Coverage

All things must come to an end eventually (at least in the world as we know it) and as much as I pick on Coinbase for various things, that won't be the case today. 

Today (actually yesterday) Coinbase further expanded their offering to purchase bitcoin with a debit card to more of the United States and this is a positive thing. They joined the ranks of Circle, CEX.io, and a slew of others not too long ago allowing a select few in the US to purchase bitcoin with a debit card.

Coinbase recently made the new service available to those in the United States after having established the offering to UK residents a while back. As we reported this was extended to approximately only 1% of the country rendering it almost useless and of little notable value to anyone at the time.

That has changed.

Coinbase has extended to other areas now and we can only assume this has been going on since its first availability. There is also no 4 day wait as is with their ACH service. It's pretty much instant. The state of Texas is one [place] where these services have been extended and a more better placement of such an offering there could not be with itBit's recent and bizarre departure from the state.

Update 4:42PM UTC 4/21/2016: Coinbase clarified the 1% gradual roll-out:

To clarify, the roll-out of debit cards as a payment method for our customers was gradual. We started with 1% of customers within the US (not related to state geography at all), then increased to 5%, 25%, and eventually to 100% of our US customers. 

The % roll-out is new information a bit more detailed whereas they previously only disclosed a slow roll out (stated on March 1st, 2016) :

...we are launching this feature to 1% of U.S. customers today, and plan to roll it out slowly to 100% over the coming months. - 

From within the Coinbase wallet platform, you can go to "Add Payment Method" and see where the previously, and most frustratingly, debit card was once grey'd out is now fully functional and working.

When prompted enter the information of the card in which you wish to use and click next. As shown in the above image, we first tried with an EVM secured card and could not get past this screen. However we tried a non-EVM secured card and it worked like a charm.

There are limits on first using your debit card on Coinbase as with all of these types of service and cautious would be an understatement  They limited our purchasing power to $60 USD. One cannot even book a hotel on Expedia for that much less anything else. 

However, as with other payment methods available on Coinbase, this will certainly rise over time. Something we thought had happened after the first purchase, however this was not the case. We got an email stating our limits have increased and anyone with a Coinbase account knows this comes all the time and doesn't always mean any such thing. 

In this case the reverse was true. The $60/day we were first told had increased to $40/day.

The worlds gift to mathematics I am not, nor will I ever will be, but I am pretty sure that this is not an increase from $60 to $40. I strongly believe that is a decrease of -$20.

Update 4:55PM UTC 4/21/2016: Coinbase responded stating that they would look into this issue with the increasing negative amounts. 

In any case, that was the only true issue we found outside of the EVM. With a few clicks and selecting the new card as the payment method an easy purchase was made of $2 and some change. 

It's a very simple process but note this was after the grueling KYC (know your customer) process and long standing account in place already so it just made it easy without the requirement of doing all of that. It may be frustrating to a new user since getting to this point was not without its issues along the way.

There's also an additional fee on top of an already inflated price (1%  or 2%) so it's not market either. In the above example market rate was at $2.39 for 0.00516336 worth of bitcoin, we paid $2.59 ... $2.50 was the Coinbase price for the purchase and the additional fee was 9 cents.

Sure there are cheaper ways to get this coin but this is easy and simple with a debit card right out of your bank account and much faster than the ACH process.

The Verdict

This new offering does not suck. There are worse things on earth, but it's not without a few glitches of which we are certain Coinbase will iron out. We could not add an EMV based card and ran into the increase in purchasing ability in a negative direction.

Other than that ... the damn thing works.

Out of pure curiosity we added the Shift Payment Visa card attached to this account. Sure enough it was added and we could buy bitcoin for an account by paying for it with bitcoin already in the account, albeit this time it told us only $40/day, not that anyone in their right mind would ever want to do that. It was just a curiosity and now you know.

All in all, we nothing nothing negative to say here. It's fast and easy (at least for already established accounts). This is a great offering from Coinbase and one that has been long overdue.

Well done.

---

Report by dinbits
Image by dinbits.com staff

The opinions expressed by authors of articles linked, referenced, or published on dinbits.com do not necessarily express, nor are endorsed by, the opinions the of dinbits.com or its affiliates.