Cobo Closes Wallet App and Sets Management Fees
Cobo announced that due to business strategy adjustments, the Cobo Wallet App will officially cease operations on December 1, 2026, at 00:00 (UTC+8), while other business lines will continue to operate normally.
Users must withdraw all assets from their accounts by November 30, 2026, at 23:59 (UTC+8); if a Cobo Wallet receiving address has been set on exchanges, mining pools, or other platforms, it must be updated or deleted to avoid assets being mistakenly transferred to an unmanaged address.
After the app is closed, if there are remaining assets in the account, Cobo will charge a monthly account management fee, calculated as 2% of the remaining assets in the respective cryptocurrency, with a minimum fee of $100 per month; failure to withdraw assets by the deadline will be considered as user consent to this fee arrangement.
The fee will be charged on the 1st of each month at 00:00 (UTC+8) for the previous calendar month, with the first charge occurring on January 1, 2027 (corresponding to December 2026); the fee will be directly deducted in the original cryptocurrency based on the remaining quantity at the time of charging, without currency conversion, and the USD value will be calculated based on the price at that time on CoinMarketCap.
If the total management fee calculated at 2% is less than $100, the fee will be charged at $100 and deducted proportionally based on the value of each cryptocurrency; if the total value of remaining assets is less than $100, all remaining assets will be deducted in one go; fees will continue to be charged until all assets are withdrawn or fully deducted.
For example, an account holding 1 BTC and 10 ETH will be charged 0.02 BTC and 0.2 ETH monthly; if only holding 1000 USDT, the 2% fee would be 20 USDT, which is below the minimum standard, so 100 USDT will be deducted; if only holding 60 USDT, the entire balance will be deducted.
This move will encourage users still using the Cobo Wallet App for storage or receiving payments to concentrate on withdrawing assets and updating associated platform whitelists and address settings; institutional custody and Wallet-as-a-Service businesses will not be affected.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Cobo was founded in 2017 by Mao Shixing (Discus Fish), co-founder of F2Pool, and Changhao Jiang, a former engineer at Facebook/Google. It completed a $13 million Series A funding round in 2018 and a $40 million Series B round led by DST Global in 2021; it initially started with miner clients, launched a wallet with PoS functionality, and strengthened security investments after the 2017 F2Pool hacking incident. Subsequently, it launched Wallet-as-a-Service in 2019, gradually divesting its hardware wallet business, and moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020, applying for licenses such as TCSP in Hong Kong.
Funds and resources continue to flow towards institutional custody infrastructure, DeFi-as-a-Service, and compliance construction, serving over 500 institutional clients and safeguarding billions of dollars in assets. Recently, it launched the Agentic Wallet aimed at AI agents, and as of September 2026, it has ended wealth products within the Wallet App (including flexible terms, ETH 2.0, etc.), redirecting redeemed assets back to the wallet balance set for closure, indicating a shift of resources from retail to high-net-worth institutions and tokenization scenarios.
This path is similar to how institutional custodians like Fireblocks continue to strengthen enterprise-level wallet governance and multi-signature permissions, while early retail wallets or mining pool-related projects have scaled back their consumer-facing functions amid intensified competition. Currently, Cobo is transitioning from retail wallets to institutional control and infrastructure, and the closure of the retail app is a proactive contraction rather than a passive exit.
This essentially represents a restructuring of the industry chain: as exchanges, self-custody, hardware wallets, and account abstraction lower retail thresholds, RWA, stablecoin settlement, and institutional tokenization raise higher demands for custody compliance, permission management, and multi-chain support. By closing inefficient retail entry points, Cobo aims to concentrate its technical and compliance resources on institutional pricing power and infrastructure layers to align with changes in regulatory environments and client structures.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Closing entry points protects profits better than maintaining them
Management fee = User inertia × Minimum threshold
As institutions concentrate, the retail side is stripped away first