XRP, the native cryptocurrency of Ripple, has been caught up in controversies over the past couple of years.
Photo Illustration by Fortune
Crypto Winter, the FTX debacle, and increased regulatory scrutiny have some crypto companies like Coinbase cutting back on cryptocurrency offerings.
The largest U.S.-based crypto exchange said on Tuesday that it will delist XRP, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic from its crypto wallet, cutting back on a group of once-high-flying digital coins.
Coinbase said that the cryptocurrencies would no longer be supported on Coinbase Wallet starting in January “due to low usage,” but users still can withdraw any unsupported assets by using their wallet recovery phrase.
Once a top token, XRP, the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain-based digital payment network Ripple, has faced a number of controversies in the past couple of years. In 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs Inc. and its founders, alleging they had misled investors and personally profited from an unregistered security.
The token is still the seventh-largest cryptocurrency in the world, with a $20 billion market cap, according to CoinMarketCap, even as over the past few months the cumulative market capitalization of the crypto sector has fallen from more than $2 trillion to about $850 billion.
The other two cryptocurrencies Coinbase is dropping, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic, both came about because of “hard forks”—when a blockchain splits in two—resulting from disagreements over the future of each.
In 2016, developers forked the Ethereum blockchain and created the Ethereum Classic token. After a hacker stole millions from the DAO, a decentralized organization with its own popular Ethereum-based token, a majority of developers voted to fork the network to restore the funds to victims. The native token of the new network is Ether, the second largest by market cap, while the token for the old Ethereum blockchain became known as Ethereum Classic, now the 23rd biggest, according to CoinMarketCap.
A year after Ethereum forked, Bitcoin Cash was produced when developers for the Bitcoin blockchain disagreed on how the network should operate. Some created a separate blockchain and a new native cryptocurrency aimed at facilitating faster payments than the original Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is the 27th-biggest crypto by market cap, according to CoinMarketCap.
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