No, you: the clash of Coinbase and VISA over giant fees

The end of the last week was marked by a serious argument between Coinbase, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange, and VISA, one of the world’s largest payment companies. The basic gist is that if one wanted to buy cryptocurrency, there was a scenario in which the acquisition fee was 50 times more than it should be. And judging by the social media, this scenario was not infrequent.

VISA has told the media portals that they had not done anything which could have led to this situation and blamed Coinbase instead, even calling this problem “unauthorized transactions” - as if implying that the cryptocurrency exchange is stealing from its users.

Coinbase, in turn, blamed VISA and its changes in the MCC code, also telling they are now communicating with the company to return funds to all users affected.

No real evidence of who actually was responsible for this disaster has appeared during this weekend, but VISA has apparently downplayed its statement about Coinbase, as witnessed by the joint statement from VISA and Wordplay published on the official Coinbase Medium account.

Image courtesy of Gesaffelstein