British banking giant Barclays no longer works with the San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase, industry website Coindesk has reported.
Citing unnamed sources with knowledge on the matter, Coindesk said earlier today that the exchange had found a new banking partner in the form of Clearbank, an upstart bank based in the UK. However, the break-up between Coinbase and Barclays has already caused problems for the exchange’s users, according to the report.
The deal with Barclays provided Coinbase with access to the UK Faster Payments Scheme (FPS), which allowed users to instantly withdraw and deposit British pounds at the exchange. With the US company no longer having access to FPS after the break-up, deposits and withdrawals in GBP for UK customers now take days to process, according to the report.
This issue is expected to be resolved in the coming weeks, as Clearbank should restore Coinbase’s FPS access by the end of the third quarter.
It was not immediately clear why the partnership between Barclays and Coinbase ended and the companies have declined to comment on the news. Some industry experts believe that Barclays’ interest in crypto has somewhat diminished in recent months.
“It is my understanding that Barclays’ risk appetite has contracted a little – I’m not sure exactly why or what’s been driving that, maybe there has been some activity they are not happy with. But it’s about Barclays’ comfort level with crypto as a whole,” the chief executive officer of a UK crypto company who wished to remain anonymous told Coindesk.
Another source told the online publication that the Coinbase-Barclays relationship had been a pilot programme that had run its course. That source also said that Barclay had probably held back Coinbase in terms of what tokens could be listed on the exchange.
This is not to say that the new banking partner won’t have a similar approach. Earlier this week, Coinbase UK delisted the privacy-focused Zcash (ZEC) coin from its platform. According to another source, the move was “completely to do with the new bank”.
Featured image: Primakov / Shutterstock.com
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