Coinbase No Longer Launching Its Crypto Lending Product

Coinbase announced today that it will not be launching the USDC APY product as previously planned. The program, which is proposed to help customers earn interest on USD Coin (USDC), with rates greater than 50x the national average of a traditional savings account and guaranteed peace of mind while they earn interest, will unfortunately not go live.

The Reason

The announcement of the termination of the lending program comes barely a week after Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, called for better regulatory clarity in the crypto space after the company was stopped from launching its cryptocurrency lending product by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The Coinbase CEO took to Twitter at the time to lament the unfair treatment the San Francisco-based exchange has suffered at the hands of security regulators. Armstrong showed his displeasure as the SEC denied the exchange’s efforts to offer a cryptocurrency lending product that would enable investors to earn yield when they lend their funds because the offering “is a security.”

Armstrong noted that the exchange reached out to the SEC but the regulator did not give any explanation as to why it was stopping the exchange’s proposed lending product and instead threatened legal action against Coinbase should it proceed to launch its crypto lending product. To avoid a legal battle with the regulator, Coinbase has decided to discontinue its crypto lending product.

The Threat List Grows

The SEC is not only going after crypto exchanges as popular billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of Bridgewater, Ray Dalio, recently said that financial regulators would take control of Bitcoin (BTC) once the cryptocurrency gains widespread mainstream adoption.

Dalio believed that if regulators fail to take control of Bitcoin when it eventually gains mainstream success, they may choose to “kill” the cryptocurrency from existing because “because they have ways of killing it.”

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