Consumer complaint received 2021-11-15
Company: Coinbase, Inc.
State: TN
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service
Sub-product: Virtual currency
Issue: Unexpected or other fees

Complaint:
On XX/XX/2021 at XXXX XXXX I transferred XXXX IOTX coins ( valued at {$190.00} at the time of transfer ) from my wallet in XXXX to my wallet in Coinbase with the intension of trading it in Coinbase to make some gains on my investment. According to XXXX the transaction was completed successfully. They give you what is called a transaction hash which allows you to click on a link that takes you to the transaction explorer in the IOTX network. I went to my Coinbase app to check my account and I noticed that my coins had not been received yet. I figured it would take some time because of traffic in the block chain. After some time I decided to check again and I noticed that coins were not there. I decided to do some research so I went to the transaction explorer in the IOTX network and noticed that the transaction was actually showing two different receiving addresses. One is called a Web.3 address and the other one is an IOTX address. The address that I got from Coinbase to receive the coins is the Web.3 address and that's the one I used to perform the transfer. The IOTX address that was created was created by the IOTX network because XXXX only handles native coins for IOTX and the reason why Coinbase gave me a Web.3 address is because they handle the IOTX coin in the ethereum base format. The issue here is that neither Coinbase, XXXX or XXXX ( which is the company that owns the IOTX coins ) made it clear for me to know that the coins had several formats and if I tried to transfer between exchanges that handled the different formats that the coins would get lost. The coins transferred from XXXX  were in the native format and the coins handled by Coinbase are in ethereum base format. I believe that XXXX should put something in place that would block one format from being transferred to another place that handles a different format. But even though Coinbase says that the coins are lost, that is not true. The wallet that resides within the Coinbase network that holds those coins has the ability to hold both formats. According to XXXX the same wallet will hold them both and that is the reason why if you if you import the address into a different wallet you are able to see the coins. 

What I'm trying to accomplish here is to retrieve my coins. So I got in touch with Coinbase to see if they can enable the native IOTX coins so that I can transfer them into my own XXXX wallet and be able to manage them myself. But the only thing I have gotten from them from all my emails and tweets are automated messages and it seems that no one is willing to help me with this problem. If they can't help me retrieve my coins then they should reimburse the value of the coins at the current time because they have gained value since the transfer transaction happened. The value of the coins at the time of this complaint is {$320.00}.

According to XXXX, the only one who can help with this issue is Coinbase so I would like Coinbase to fix this issue. Either help me retrieve my coins or pay me their value.

Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief