I ran into a similar issue when building my project in AppCenter. rgkobashi's solution seems to be the right answer
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/651941?answerId=640461022#640461022
I already had this version on my local machine so builds were working fine. Then AppCenter kept throwing the OP's error. If you're getting this locally, upgrade CocoaPods. If your CI is getting this error, force the CocoaPods version to 1.10.0.rc.1.
In AppCenter that would be done by creating a appcenter-post-clone.sh file and adding these lines
echo "uninstalling all cocoapods versions"
sudo gem uninstall cocoapods --all
echo "installing cocoapods version 1.10.0.rc.1"
sudo gem install cocoapods -v 1.10.0.rc.1