The major bitcoin wallet and trading platform boasts of nearly 11 million wallets serving 45,000 merchants and 9,000 developer apps. The claim, however, did not pass unquestioned.

The statistics has been published on Coinbase website. To compare, another popular wallet provider, Blockchain.info, claims to have 10.4 million wallets. In the description, Blockchain states that the number of users is equal to the number of wallets. Other competitors to Coinbase including Mycelium and Circle prefer not to disclose their numbers.

The news about the Coinbase achievement prompted a discussion on Reddit where bitcoin community members questioned the validity of the claim.

“Would be interested to know how many of these 5 million accounts have a) bitcoin in them b) activity in the last 6 months,” wrote the user Calm_down_stupid.

Some commenters shared the negative experience they have had with Coinbase. Other users chose to defend the company:

“There are a lot of people who hold bitcoin now, who wouldn't be holding it if coinbase didn't exist,” wrote jmw74.

Coinbase, established in 2012, is a San Francisco-based company and one of the most popular bitcoin wallets and trading platforms in the world operating in 32 countries. For registration, it demands thorough user identification and full bank account details. Among the bitcoin community, it is considered to be one of the most conformist platforms, in contrast to other similar services who do not request full user de-anonymisation.

The platform’s policies used to sparkle controversy among users before. In addition to privacy issues, in August, Coinbase announced sufficient increase of commission for buying bitcoin with plastic cards as a part of their new fee plan.

To aggravate users’ anonymity problems, Coinbase has recently lost a court action against the US Internal Revenue Service. The Northern District of California Court approved the taxmen’s claim to examine all Coinbase transactions for 2014 and 2015 including users’ personal data.

Roman Korizky