To kick things off, let’s do a brief overview of what Coinbase and Coinbase Pro are. Coinbase is one of the most well-established exchanges out there, having been founded back in 2012.
For those who missed it, Coinbase was even listed in the stock market earlier this year. That could be important for people who believe that stock market-listed companies are held more accountable than privately owned ones.
So, where is Coinbase headquartered? Last year, its team was headquartered in San Francisco. However, as work culture changed with the pandemic, Coinbase became one of the first fully remote companies. This means that it has no formal headquarters.
Now when it comes to regulatory compliance, Coinbase is one of the most impressive exchanges out there. It holds a relevant license for every U.S. state and is registered as a money services business with FinCEN.
It’s also extremely important to note that Coinbase comprises TWO different exchanges accessible with a single account.
You have regular old Coinbase, which is super easy to use but has ridiculously high fees compared to the other option: Coinbase Pro. This gives you more advanced trading functionality, access to a wider range of cryptos, and much lower fees.
So, when creating an account with Coinbase, you are creating both a Coinbase and a Coinbase Pro account. The login and passwords will be the same. Do be aware of that. However, we recommend using Coinbase Pro if you can handle it, and it isn’t difficult if you do your homework.
Coinbase Pro might also be for you if you are an advanced trader. If you didn’t know, It used to be called G-DAX until a rebrand in 2018.
Apart from offering a more advanced trading experience, many more coins on Coinbase Pro are not available in the traditional Coinbase exchange. This makes it a much better option than regular Coinbase, even if you are new to crypto.
What Features Does Coinbase Pro Offer?
Coinbase has many features that its users can take advantage of to take their trading to the next level. Let’s take a look at some of them!
Lots Of Cryptocurrencies
Coinbase Pro offers users the ability to trade lots of digital assets on a secure, insurance-backed platform. Many of the currencies that are available at Coinbase Pro aren’t at regular Coinbase.
However, compared to other exchanges like Binance or Kucoin, we realized these have many more currencies. If you would want to read reviews about any of these two exchanges, we have plenty on our website.
Trade Everywhere In The World
Coinbase Pro accepts traders worldwide, and they have easy fiat onboarding for those in the U.S., U.K., and the E.U. If you like in the United States, you probably are aware that many other exchanges are unable to operate here. This can make it hard to find a good fit, so Coinbase is so popular among American traders.
Insurance Protection And Security
Coinbase Pro has the same securities and protections that you have at Coinbase itself. Coinbase practices active coin management protocols, including cold storage (offline storage) and multi-signature wallets.
The platform also runs Coinbase custody, which are the professionals at storing coins.
In addition to this, all U.S. dollar balances at Coinbase have FDIC insurance. This means that the U.S. government federally insures all clients who have a U.S. dollar balance below $250,000.
Top-Notch Self Custody Mobile Wallet
With this Mobile Wallet, you don’t need a Coinbase account to take advantage of it.
This wallet allows you to store and trade around 500 crypto assets. It also lets you hold your NFT’S all in one place. It integrates with multiple DeXes if you want to dabble on those types of exchanges.
Low Trading Fees
If you are a regular trader, then you’ll no doubt be interested in the trading fees. Coinbase Pro operates a maker-taker fee model, and this means that they have 2 fee rates based on whether you are taking liquidity from the exchange or making it.
These fees are dynamic and can vary according to the amount of volume that you have traded in the past 30 days. So, the more you trade, the lower your fees will be.
When comparing the fees with regular Coinbase, we noticed these are much lower. If you try to buy $10 of Bitcoin on the traditional platform, you will be charged a $1 fee. Astonishing. Things change when you trade with higher value, but not that much.
On Coinbase Pro, these fees are significantly lower. Putting the same example, if you try to trade $10 worth of Bitcoin, you only get a $0.05 fee. For higher values, like $100, there is only a $0.50 fee.
Coinbase Visa Credit Card
This credit card allows you to spend your crypto wherever Visa is accepted. However, we did wish Coinbase wouldn’t charge a 5 euro fee to issue the card. If you want to use it despite this, you should know that you can spend many types of crypto. These are the following: BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, BAT, REP, ZRX, and XLM.
“Trading Is Disabled” Issue
Everyone wants to trade with lower fees and save more money, and we defined that this is why Coinbase Pro exists. However, many problems could happen on your journey to financial freedom, which is one of them.
Coinbase Pro “Trading is disabled” may be a strange problem to come across, but it certainly happened to many users. If you face this issue, we are sure you’ll be glad to continue reading. We’ll explain why this problem could be happening and a possible solution that worked for most people.
We hope you can get this sorted out thanks to our help and tips.
Why Does This Problem Happen?
First of all, you should know that there are many reasons why this problem could happen. As such, let’s try to look at the different reasons.
Payments With Third-Party Documents
To operate in the “trading” section of Coinbase Pro, you must be verified. There, they will ask you to enter your document. In this way, they make sure that you are a real person, and all your account information will also be attached to that.
The problem arises when you try to use a payment method (credit/debit card) assigned to another person. That means another I.D. If you try to do this, your buy and sell orders may be rejected.
To set another example, if your name is Jeffrey Jelen and you use your friend’s credit card, Alan Lennar, this issue will be Chargebacks.
If Coinbase has Chargebacks to your account, they will likely deactivate the trading option. In this way, if you believe that a specific transaction was incorrect or unauthorized and you decide to claim the funds, you will have to wait.
To speed up the process, you can contact Coinbase customer support. This is something that we will cover in detail later.
Limits
Coinbase has a system that defines limits on what amount of cryptocurrency you can buy or sell. Many factors define these. For example:
Purchase history
Type of deposit method
Amount of verification completed in your account
You can search your limits on the Account Limits section of your Settings. It is possible that Coinbase can ban you from trading if you surpass your limit.
If you would like to increase them, you can do two things. First, you may want to complete every form of security verification available on Coinbase. This includes enabling two-factor authentication and filling in ALL the personal information. Secondly, you can add more deposit methods and try purchasing with them.
Coinbase Internal Issues
As we know, there isn’t any platform that is completely safe from bugs and errors. A big problem happened with Coinbase a month ago from writing this, when the platform went offline.
The event left a lot of Coinbase and Coinbase Pro customers without the chance of trading any cryptocurrency. We know the platform’s impact going offline may be significant on all types of traders; however, this lasted only 2 hours.
Many other times, Coinbase had this type of issue. In 2017, the platform had also suffered from technical problems and left traders in a bad mood. It’s something to think about.
User protection
If Coinbase doesn’t allow you to place a new trade on a particular cryptocurrency, it may be due to protection. Protection for what though? Protection from potential volatility, whipsaws, big gaps, and so on with respect to that cryptocurrency.
How Can You Contact Coinbase Customer Support?
Phone Support
If you want to check why you can’t solve this “trading is disabled” problem, you will need to contact support. Well, to contact them, there is a phone number you can find on google.
However, this is purely automated, and the questions they ask you to solve your problem are useless. You are left to find the answers on the Coinbase website. This means if you expect to get in touch with a human via a phone call, you won’t be able to do so.
There is only one thing for which this phone could be useful. That could be for disabling your account if your security seems to be compromised. That’s it.
Email Support
Coinbase also offers email ticketed support, which is the one you will probably be making use of to get in touch with them. The response time of this support can vary depending on the issue and the demand. While Coinbase doesn’t have the slowest response time of all exchanges, it doesn’t excel either.
If access to live support is essential to you, Coinbase might not be the best crypto exchange. While the exchange has an excellent knowledge base, you won’t be finding it too useful to solve this specific issue.
Step By Step Solution For “Trading Is Disabled” Issue
Log in to Coinbase
Click on “name” (top right corner)
Click Settings
Click Profile
Under Personal Details, highlight “Street Address” – delete it. Retype your address in the “Street Address” field, and you will notice addresses appearing below. Continue typing specific details of your address until you see your address show up, tab to it, and press enter (all other fields pertaining to your address (city, state, zip code, country) will populate) and click save.
Sign out, then back in and change the URL to coinbase.com/verify-identity and answer the questions on the RIGHT. Do not override anything on the left as this information has already been updated from the previous actions you took.
Change the URL to coinbase.com/verify-document and complete verification again.
You will receive an email immediately, and when you log back into the platform, the issue should be completely fixed!
Keep in mind that this is not an official solution but a workaround many users have found useful. We are sharing it here as there is no harm in trying it. However, if it doesn’t work, getting in touch with Coinbase’s support team might be the only way to go.
Conclusion
We know that it can be quite difficult to fix a problem on your own when it turns out to be something so overwhelming… Especially since it has to do with your money. When this happens, it is understandable you don’t want to wait for customer support to help.
If the workaround we suggested works for you, that’s great! If not, we hope you receive help from customer support as soon as possible. Make sure to provide as much information as possible in your support ticket to ensure the fastest response time.
If you want to find out about other common issues with some exchanges, make sure to check our crypto section!