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  • Customer Support Improvements at Coinbase

    Customer Support Improvements at Coinbase

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    By Casper Sorensen, Vice President, Customer Experience

    The following is the latest update in our series of blog posts describing our commitment to continually improving our customer experience.

    At Coinbase, we strive to be the most trusted and easy to use platform to help our customers access the cryptoeconomy. We recognize the challenges some of our customers have experienced with their Coinbase accounts, and we want to reiterate that continually improving the customer experience remains a top priority. In my last post, we committed to providing you ongoing updates on the investments we’re making to better serve customers. Since then, we’ve continued to add even more support staff, improve and simplify our products, and identify additional opportunities to serve you more quickly and competently. Here’s an update:

    Reduced customer support backlogs.

    We have recently eliminated our backlog across most queues and have sufficient agent capacity in place to minimize the risk of potential future backlogs. Since January, our customer contact rate (the number of times customers contact customer service divided by the number of monthly transacting users) has been reduced by 70%. Over that same period, we saw our total number of verified users increase from 43 million to 56 million.

    But we realize we still have work to do. Here’s what we’re doing to make our customer service even better:

    Adding more support staff.

    One of the biggest investments we’ve made is in our support staff. We now have more than 3,000 people dedicated to solving customer issues. This represents a more than 5x increase in support staff since January. We’re continuing to hire great people to quickly support our customers’ needs, as well as ensure we’re meeting customers where they are, which includes a growing number of social media platforms.

    Offering live support.

    We’re on track to support customers live, via chat and phone. We’ve already begun rolling out a virtual assistant to help customers navigate common issues, and live chat via messaging is coming later this year. We’re working to offer live phone support in the coming months to assist customers with several issues including account security.

    Keeping you safe.

    Coinbase takes extensive security measures to ensure your account and cryptocurrency investment remains as safe as possible. In addition, we provide ongoing education and resources for how to protect your accounts from Account Take-Overs — also referred to as “ATOs”. This happens when a bad actor is able to use your login credentials to access your account and perform fraudulent activity. While ATOs have only impacted a very small subset of our customers (a tiny fraction of one percent), we recognized that when they do occur, they can cause stress and confusion for our customers. That’s why we are standing up a phone support team which will guide these customers through the necessary steps to quickly lock down accounts, and restore access.

    Improving product User Experience (UX) and workflows.

    Our product teams continually ship new features designed to simplify and improve our products, including in-product alerts to provide relevant and useful information to customers. Through systematic customer pain point identification and close collaboration with our engineering team, we’ve been able to further reduce the possibility of high severity issues. For example, we’re implementing two-factor authentication recommendations for users with high balances to provide these users with additional security. By helping our customers avoid potential issues in the first place, we’ve made a meaningful impact on the number of customers coming to customer support for help. Further, we are hyper-focused on making sure our site is stable, ensuring during bull and bear markets you have the ability to buy and sell.

    Expanding education and training tools.

    We’re improving our self-service online Coinbase Help resources. The cryptoeconomy continues to rapidly change, with new technologies introduced every week. Through initiatives like Coinbase Learn, we’re committed to helping our customers navigate these changes and our platform of products.

    We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve the Coinbase experience for our customers. We will never tire in our pursuit of creating more value for our customers. For support questions, please visit our support page.


    Customer Support Improvements at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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  • DeFi proved resilient during the March 2020 and May 2021 market crises

    DeFi proved resilient during the March 2020 and May 2021 market crises

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    As if 2020 didn’t provide enough nail-biting moments, 2021 is shaping up to be quite an interesting year for cryptocurrency. With the price of Bitcoin (BTC) floating around the $35,000 mark, skeptics and pundits are flocking to the streets of social media to celebrate the long-awaited demise of the decentralized economy. Of course, they quite conveniently forgot that the price of Bitcoin has experienced a 533% increase since the third halving happened in May 2020. 

    Given the number of people claiming the crypto bubble has burst — including former U.S. President Donald Trump — it is almost hard to remember that the price of Bitcoin was hovering between $9,000 and $10,000 a mere 12 months ago.

    Since the halving, in fact, decentralized finance (DeFi) has emerged as the most promising sector of the cryptocurrency economy, fueling the adoption of the crypto space. A quick glance at the growth statistics clearly indicates just how much momentum DeFi has generated over the past year. In June 2020, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi was around $1.05 billion. Today, DeFi boasts more than $104 billion locked-in protocols.

    Related: Was 2020 a ‘DeFi year,’ and what is expected from the sector in 2021? Experts answer

    Although DeFi is set to lead the crypto space into the mainstream, DeFi has been challenged to its core over the past two years. While some onlookers may point to the hurdles in March 2020 and May 2021, the fact remains that DeFi is quite resilient and is poised for further growth moving ahead.

    Calm in the storm

    Despite the frenetic growth of DeFi, the space has experienced two substantial stress tests over the past two years: March 2020 and May 2021. To be clear, these instances challenged the DeFi space in ways it had not previously been challenged. The spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the Elon Musk-provoked panic selloff, coupled with the crackdown on China’s Bitcoin miners, culminated in the loss of $1 trillion across the entire crypto market.

    If the Twitter account of Musk is partially responsible for summoning the storm, DeFi provided a calming presence within the storm.

    Following the massive panic selloff ignited by Musk, a far more telling and impressive thing occurred: nothing. DeFi protocols continued to operate exactly as designed: no crashes, no glitches. In fact, the DeFi sector would grow to surpass $100 billion in value — passing its stress test with flying colors.

    This feat is especially impressive when juxtaposed against the stress test administered in March 2020. The combined capitalization of the DeFi sector took a hard nosedive — crashing below $1 billion. Worse, the frenzy culminated in a crisis within MakerDAO’s liquidations system, where the protocol became under-capitalized, and roughly $8 million worth of Ether (ETH) was bid on and purchased for free over a 40-minute time period.

    Like the rest of the DeFi space, however, MakerDAO survived. Although its survival required it to auction off native MKR tokens to fill the bad debt, it was also able to weather the storm of March 2020’s “Black Thursday.”

    Just 12 months later, DeFi would once again carry the mantle for the acceleration of the crypto space. Even famed mainstream investor Mark Cuban would go on to claim that with DeFi, cryptocurrency’s “utility has changed. There are so many things that you can do now. If I’ve got my Bitcoin, whether it goes up or down in value, I can take a percentage of that and borrow and lend and earn income, and be my own personal banker.”

    CEX and DEX performance

    The impact of the two aforementioned crises was vastly different across centralized and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), as well. While DEXs navigated the situations relatively effectively, their centralized counterparts experienced outages and significant liquidation chaos.

    The May 2021 crisis was extremely difficult for centralized exchanges (CEXs), with more than $7 billion in futures positions being liquidated in a single day, marking the second-highest single-day liquidation ever. Additionally, CEX users experienced functionality issues, including prevention from adding collateral, closing loans or completing trades.

    Related: Decentralization vs. centralization: Where does the future lie? Experts answer

    Decentralized exchanges, on the other hand, were not only able to avoid outages or downtime, but DEXs also experienced unprecedented trade volume, according to Dune Analytics. Though, that is not to say there were no hiccups along the way. A record $700 million was liquidated in DeFi protocols over a two-day span, and users suffered from egregious gas prices. However, the protocols operated as designed, and did not present compounding issues to users at any point.

    This alone highlighted the robustness of DeFi when compared with centralized platforms.

    DeFi is the new secure asset fund for users

    Perhaps the most important factor in the resilience of DeFi has been the ability of crypto traders to generate significant returns on tokens, regardless of the market volatility. DeFi protocols have become increasingly popular over the past year, as they reward traders with yield for their collateral and their farming. More broadly, yield farming helps traders generate maximum returns on their crypto assets by borrowing, lending and staking across different DeFi protocols. The trading technique is quite similar to dividend payments in the traditional banking system, where the yield paid out to traders helps them generate compounded returns.

    Related: Yield farming is a fad, but DeFi promises to change the way we interact with money

    This method was instrumental in helping DeFi weather the storms of 2020 and 2021, as traders continued to operate within DeFi protocols to earn annual percentage yield, or APY, while simultaneously circumventing the turbulence within the market.

    The volatility we’ve witnessed over the past 18 months was largely unable to dissuade traders from investing in DeFi. In fact, the statistics argue the contrary. While some speculators were dusting off their snow coats in preparation for crypto winter, DeFi protocols experienced monthly all-time high revenues — pushing the TLV in DeFi protocols to nearly $8 billion.

    The massive economic stress tests of 2020 and 2021 had the potential to dismantle previous iterations of the decentralized economy. This evolved, matured version of the cryptosphere, however, was much more prepared to weather the storm. Akin to influencer Logan Paul squaring off against lightweight champion Floyd Mayweather, simply surviving is a huge victory. And, similar to Paul, the DeFi space fared far better than most assumed.

    Not only did DeFi protocols survive, they thrived. The volatility within the free market must not be the takeaway from the previous two years. The more telling occurrence is that DeFi passed these tests — tests that centralized protocols struggled with.

    DeFi’s resilience alone speaks volumes about its potential and its staying power.

    This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

    The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

    Doug Leonard is the CEO of Hifi, a fixed-rate, fixed-term lending protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. Doug holds a BS in information systems from Brigham Young University and a master’s degree in management information systems from Brigham Young University. Before being named CEO of Hifi Finance, Doug spent a year as a senior software architect at Mainframe.