Coinbase includes pages of tips on investing in tokens.
London/Washington: Coinbase Global has removed “how to buy” instructions for at least three crypto tokens that have been the subject of “back pull” warnings that investors could lose their money, saying Thursday it plans to improve security measures.
Jaclyn Sales, a Coinbase spokesperson, said the links were removed from the cryptocurrency exchange’s website after being brought to the attention of Reuters this week. There would also be an upgrade to the security measures on the automatically created web pages, she said.
Nasdaq-listed Coinbase contains pages of tips on investing in tokens, and the pages in question were informative rather than making them available for trading in the app or wallet.
Sales said the pages, which contained a disclaimer that the information was not investment advice and that the exchange was not liable for “errors and delays,” were automatically created based on information provided by data website CoinMarketCap.
CoinMarketCap said it was not aware of the Coinbase pages and Shaun Heng, vice president of growth and operations, said there was no partnership with Coinbase.
Sales said it is not clear whether Coinbase has executed checks on the coins whose information pages have been removed. Coinbase would “build a more robust disclaimer for the pages that are automatically created,” the exchange told Reuters via email on Thursday.
Coinbase would also “build a process to remove other pages that CoinMarketCap has flagged as possible scams,” it said, adding that “assets related to known scams were not tradable on the exchange.”
‘PULL BACK’
A page taken down by Coinbase featured DeFi100 and told users to check CoinMarketCap to find out where it could be bought.
However, the DeFi100 page on CoinMarketCap warns, “We have received multiple reports that this project has ended as a scam. Be careful.”
CoinMarketCap, which does not sell cryptocurrencies on its site, says that DeFi100’s tokens have not recorded daily trading volumes since Nov. 14.
The DeFi100 website and Medium blog are offline. The last tweet was in May last year.
CoinMarketCap did not respond to requests for comment on DeFi100 or its warning.
Twitter users claimed in May that DeFi100 had performed a “back pull,” with investors pouring money into bogus projects before the developers of a coin run off with the money.
DeFi100 denied the allegations in one of its latest tweets, on May 23. Acknowledging that investors had suffered losses, it said it hoped to “get the project back on track”.
It did not respond to requests from Reuters for comment.
‘MERCENARY’
Coinbase also removed a page featuring a token called Mercenary which, like DeFi100, was not available in Coinbase’s app or wallet.
Mercenary launched in January and peaked at nearly $20. But on January 26, it dropped from just over $8 to a fraction of a cent in minutes and the price has not recovered since, data from CoinMarketCap shows.
Blockchain security firm PeckShield tweeted on January 26 that Mercenary had been hit by a carpet pull and warned buyers of it.
Reuters was unable to contact Mercenary while the website and Twitter page are both offline.
It’s unclear when Coinbase launched its page on Mercenary, which archived webpages featured CoinMarketCap for the first time on Jan. 15. CoinMarketCap did not respond to a question about whether it had taken Mercenary off its system.
Coinbase also removed a page on a token named after Squid Game, which crashed to near zero in November in what cybersecurity experts say was another carpet draw. It was also not available in Coinbase’s app or wallet.
The website and Medium account behind the SQUID token were quickly taken offline after the project was unraveled and will remain offline. Twitter also suspended the project’s account for violating the network’s rules.
The developers behind SQUID said on Telegram in November that they were abandoning the token, saying “someone is trying to hack our project”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
