By Brett Tejpaul, Head of Institutional Sales, Trading and Prime
Our goal is to be the trusted bridge to the cryptoeconomy for all institutions, to fuel widespread adoption of crypto, and ultimately to increase global economic freedom. Coinbase Prime, an integrated solution that provides secure custody, an advanced trading platform, prime services and market data, has become a first choice for sophisticated investors and institutions that want to start investing in digital assets.
Coinbase Prime and Enfusion are connecting to offer cryptocurrency trading to financial institutions and investment managers. By providing straight-through processing to Coinbase Prime via APIs Enfusion is providing its clients institutional access to digital asset custody and algorithmic trading, with the potential to further our relationship in the future.
“Enfusion’s connectivity with Coinbase Prime will allow us to seamlessly manage our crypto positions alongside other assets from a single interface, streamlining our trading operations. We’re very excited to see two platforms we rely on every day team up to continue improving how institutions access the crypto markets,’ said Eric Peters, CEO and CIO of One River, a leading asset management firm.
We’re excited to connect to our first OEMS Enfusion, as their native multi-asset management system is a natural first choice to collaborate with on a joint institutional offering. We expect financial institutions to continue to increase their portfolio exposure to crypto, and we’re committed to offering the best tools to enable them to manage it efficiently.
The integrations between both platforms are expected to be completed in Q2 2022. To learn more about Coinbase Prime click here.
Coinbase Prime and Enfusion team up to bring seamless crypto trading to institutional investors was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Coinbase is delighted to announce the launch of the Community Analyst Program, a.k.a. the CAP Program. This is a new and exciting way for students, professionals and community members who share our core beliefs to contribute to Coinbase’s mission to increase economic freedom.
If you are crypto-native, crypto-passionate or insatiably crypto-curious, this is an opportunity to get involved in the fast-paced crypto industry.You will gain a foundation of meaningful experiences and relationships to build-on!
So let’s cover the basics: the Why, Who, What, Where and When?
Why Become a Community Analyst?
With the cryptocurrency industry evolving rapidly, Coinbase’s goal to help bridge crypto and the mainstream will become even more important. As such, we are launching a Community Analyst program to provide a platform for crypto-passionate individuals to launch their crypto careers, either at Coinbase or elsewhere in the space. At Coinbase, we believe it’s our responsibility to be good stewards of the space, which means developing the next generation of leaders and elite talent to drive growth for the wider industry. This will help accelerate wider industry growth.
As a Community Analyst, you will be on the front lines collecting information and signals from community hotspots, in-person events and/or conferences as well as public online resources (including the blockchain). Some benefits of the program include:
An hourly wage & Coinbase gear!
Opportunity to influence Coinbase initiatives
Further career development opportunities
Build relationships within your cohort and in the crypto community
Opportunities to meet and get to know the Coinbase team
Who Is Eligible for the Program?
Any university students, graduate degree students, full-time professionals or crypto community members are encouraged to apply. Community Analysts will be part-time contractors. Depending on company needs and candidate fit, Coinbase may extend summer internships or full-time offers.
What is Required of a Community Analyst? Where is the program held?
You need to be crypto-native or crypto-passionate and insatiably curious. The program is fully remote. Duties will include both virtual and real-world components, such as:
Embedding into crypto communities, participating and building relationships in community hot-spots throughout Discord, Telegram, Twitter, and other outlets.
Generating periodic reports or research analysis on emerging trends, community sentiment and grassroots activities.
Attending in-person meetups or crypto industry conferences as needed.
Average commitment of 10–15 hours per week.
You will update the Coinbase team during bi-weekly check-up calls and keep us updated on your progress via group chats. We expect Community Analysts to be self-motivated and dedicated to producing measurable results.
When does the program start?
The inaugural program cohort will be rolled out from January 2022 lasting through May 2022, and will be termed the “Spring Cohort”. A Fall cohort is scheduled for September 2022 to December 2022. Spring and Fall cohorts are expected to occur every year the program is active.
How do I join?
To join, you must first fill out the application form here. Those interested should have a basic familiarity with the cryptocurrency industry and blockchain space. If selected, you will have a call with our partners to ensure our goals and expectations are aligned. If you advance through the phone screening process, the onboarding process will begin — more details will be shared at that time.
Becoming a Community Analyst leads to opportunities to expand your role, such as potential summer internship offers, full-time offers or even opportunities developing within the communities you engage in. More information about opportunities to join a Coinbase summer internship or full-time offer will be given upon successful completion of the program. Note: Community Analysts will be contracted through a third party and will not be engaged as Full Time Employees of the company.
Coinbase Community Analyst Program was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
TLDR: Over the past year, Coinbase has invested in tooling to eliminate static content across our web frontend. This is the story of how we did it and why it’s important.
Coinbase Learn(ed)
The Coinbase educational portal, Coinbase Learn, launched in late 2020. Learn contains hundreds of beginner guides, practical tutorials, and market updates and is maintained by a dedicated team of content editors.
Our engineers explored various options for powering Learn. Ideally, we wanted a solution that would allow us to seamlessly integrate content into the Coinbase logged out experience.
Hosted options for blog-like content such as Medium provided too little flexibility.
The WordPress framework was too opinionated and directly tied to the UI.
We ended up opting for a headless CMS, specifically Contentful. Contentful is a content platform that delivers a headless approach to content as well as backend extensibility to integrate with our preferred tools and ways of working. Being “headless” means the CMS is UI agnostic — it separates the content from the experience, simply providing structured JSON to the frontend, which allows for us to totally control the frontend experience.
Integrating with Contentful was simply a matter of creating data structures representing different types of content (via the Contentful UI) and then mapping those data structures to React components (which handled actually rendering the data)
Our initial CMS architecture
Donning the Flightsuit
With Coinbase Learn under our belt and the Coinbase Direct Public Offering (DPO) on the horizon, a cohesion initiative kicked off (deemed Project Flightsuit). Project Flightsuit sought to bring a cohesive look and feel across Coinbase logged out properties as well as enforcing design standards across newly created landing pages.
While investigating the state of the Coinbase product landing pages, we uncovered 40 product surfaces spread across 15 different repositories / frontend applications. The various frontends were built using a variety of technologies — everything from React with Typescript (our current standard) to legacy Ruby on Rails templates, to static HTML.
A peek of our “Page Architecture” overview document
Leveraging the Contentful integration initially set up for Coinbase Learn, we began to create a set of “blocks” which could be used to standardize landing page layouts (while aligning around our new brand guidelines).
“Blocks,” also known as content types, are high-level components which combine to create landing pages. For example, a “Hero” block might contain a “Title”, “Subtitle” and “CTA Button” in the CMS, which corresponds to a React component on the frontend.
A “Hero Block” data structure (left) and the corresponding React component (right)
By creating a thoughtful “Block-based system” (and reworking our existing landing pages to use this system), we were able to efficiently migrate nearly all landing pages to a single frontend application, powered by React, and integrated with Contentful.
Once the block system was in place, migrating pages was a relatively simple task of dragging / dropping various blocks via the Contentful UI, and redirecting the old page routes to the new, CMS-driven alternative.
1, 2, Automate
Post-Project Flightsuit, our team focused on improving the usability and resiliency of the CMS. A few lessons learned:
Making the CMS easy-to-use for non-technical team members is extremely important. With our first pass at CMS landing pages, we had created some data structures with advanced features (such as generic layout creation) which were mostly only understood and serviceable by Engineers (thus defeating the main value prop of the CMS). We countered this by favoring editor experience above all else. By automating advanced features within Contentful wherever possible (such as automatically determining which layout would best suit a set of content), we could allow editors to focus on editing rather than building.
By integrating with Contentful (a third party), our frontends became dependent upon Contentful’s uptime. Contentful has a very consistent track record of nearly 100% uptime, but this reliance was challenged when Contentful experienced two outages due to some widespread DNS issues. (To be fair to Contentful, these outages were also experienced by some of the world’s largest websites and were the only instances we’ve seen where Contentful was unavailable). To ensure availability of our higher visibility pages (such as our homepage), we determined the best path forward was to introduce a reverse API proxy which leverages the stale-if-error header, in order for our CDN to serve cached content if the upstream call happens to fail. This allows us to stay up even if the CMS goes down (for X number of days).
Above: Our CMS architecture before and after adding the cached reverse proxy
3. Training new engineering teams on working with and extending the CMS was a primary focus. My team had become the sole source of knowledge of an increasingly-used system and were often sourced to onboard new engineers to the system on a one-off basis. To better spread the knowledge of the framework, we developed the CMS Ambassador Program, which aimed to train and bring together subject matter experts for the CMS throughout the company. The program begins with a 1.5 hour structured workshop where attendees learn the ins and outs of integrating with the CMS. While this program is currently driven in real-time and onboarding sessions are held as-needed, we are currently in the process of converting this to a self-service course via an internal training tool.
A snapshot of our internal CMS Ambassador workshop
Key Results
As 2021 comes to a close, we’re proud to look back at how far we’ve come over the past year. Here is the progress we’ve seen after successfully implementing our company-wide CMS:
Landing page creation time reduced from an average of 2 weeks to less than one day.
Content change turnaround time reduced from an hour-long process of code change/review/merge/deploy to under 10 mins, and without engineering involvement.
By the end of year, 90% of all top level surfaces will be covered. This means that nearly all top-level, logged out product surfaces on Coinbase will be powered via Contentful by end of year.
These efficiency gains have been achieved thanks largely to our leadership’s investment in infra and developer tooling. Coinbase truly cares about engineering excellence, developer experience, and automating routine processes.
We also couldn’t have achieved this without the hard work of some astoundingly thoughtful, talented individuals (each of whom I’m incredibly proud to work with):
Leon Haggarty, Askat Bakyev, João Melo, Stephen Lee, Wilhelm Willie, Bryant Gallardo, Guiherme Luersen, Raymond Sohn, Leonardo Zizzamia, Christopher Nascone (Eng)
Bobby Rasmusson, Russ Ballard (Product)
Ananth Chandrasekharan, Goutham Buchi, Manish Gupta (EVP of Eng)
We’re all excited to enter 2022 with a shiny, unified frontend and minimal one-off content change requests on the horizon. If you’re interested in joining Coinbase, check out our Careers page here. Here’s to a happy new year!
Scaling Content at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
By Brian Armstrong, CEO and Cofounder, & Alex Reeve, Identity Product Lead
These days, everyone is talking about the Metaverse.
Primitive Metaverse platforms are selling virtual land for millions of dollars. Billions more are being invested in Metaverse startups. And Mark Zuckerberg recently renamed his entire company to reflect a focus on building the Metaverse.
The term “Metaverse” is not new. It was first used by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” But as technology improves, and we spend more of our lives online, more people are starting to think about what’s next — and how the future might revolutionize both the digital and the physical world.
Recently, our team put together an internal presentation about the Metaverse, who’s working on it, and how crypto will help make it real. I thought the presentation was well done, so I’m sharing most of the slides here.
Defining the Metaverse
At Coinbase, our thinking about the Metaverse has been heavily influenced by venture capitalist and writer Matthew Ball (you can find his work here). Like Matt, we define the Metaverse as:
The future of the internet: A massively-scaled, persistent, interactive, and interoperable real-time platform comprised of interconnected virtual worlds where people can socialize, work, transact, play, and create.
The earliest version of the internet, Web1, was about accessing static web pages. Web2 is about interactive, social experiences within closed ecosystems. And Web3 will be about digital ownership within an open, decentralized environment.
The Metaverse is the distant evolution of Web3. In its most complete form, it will be a series of decentralized, interconnected virtual worlds with a fully functioning economy where people can do just about anything they can do in the physical world.
Importantly, the Metaverse is not the same thing as gaming (an activity you can do within the Metaverse), or virtual reality (a way of interfacing with the Metaverse). It’s also not the same as Web3 (a distant ancestor of the Metaverse).
To illustrate this, here’s how some current platforms stack up against our definition of the Metaverse:
Elements of the Metaverse
While the full Metaverse is years away, it will rest on a foundation that’s being built right now.
Like the internet today, the Metaverse will rely on hardware and infrastructure, tools and standards, and regulatory frameworks — most of which haven’t been fully developed yet.
But unlike today’s internet, there won’t just be one Metaverse. There will be many Metaverses, and they’ll be interconnected. That’s why it will be important for any Metaverse to be trustless — meaning people can interact directly without going through an intermediary — and permissionless — meaning anyone can participate without authorization from a governing body.
To achieve this, the Metaverse will rely on blockchain to transfer identity and ownership across virtual worlds, attestation to verify them, and payment rails that allow people buy, sell, and earn income within a decentralized economy.
Who’s building the Metaverse today?
While we can’t build anything close to the full Metaverse yet, different companies and organizations are experimenting with different elements of it. Most fall into three categories:
The Metaverse ecosystem is still very much in its infancy: emergent and yet to be defined. That’s its beauty too. There’s a heavy focus on gaming, mostly because it’s easy to monetize. But we’re beginning to see glimpses of what the future might look like.
Identity
Identity determines who you are, what you can access and do, and how you’re represented across the worlds of the Metaverse.
In the Metaverse, our identities will have to include an easy login, a unique ID, an avatar that represents us, metadata that follows us, and attestation so we can prove who we are. Here’s where each of those pieces stands today:
Where Coinbase comes in
At Coinbase, we want to help pull all the pieces of identity together — essentially creating an identity on-ramp into the Metaverse.
That’s the idea behind our work with ENS, which makes it possible to create a unique username NFT that resolves to a wallet. Eventually, this will allow users to carry a unique ID across different worlds in the Metaverse.
We’re also working on technology that will allow you to purchase your avatar, define and maintain your public profile, and establish trust. And we’re working on features like Sign in with [Eth/Coinbase], which could allow users to sign into every app in the Metaverse.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, this isn’t about expanding our business or making money. It’s about building a critical piece of the Metaverse ecosystem, and helping crypto grow in the right way.
We know that the Metaverse will exist, and we know it will be a series of interconnected virtual worlds. Our goal is to make it easy for anyone to establish their identity and gain access to those worlds in a way that’s simple, trusted, and decentralized.
If we succeed, it will allow the Metaverse to reach its full potential — and keep it free and open to everyone.
How Coinbase thinks about the Metaverse was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Starting today Decentralized Social (DESO) is available on Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now trade, send, receive, or store DESO in most Coinbase-supported regions, with certain exceptions indicated in each asset page here. Trading for these assets is also supported on Coinbase Pro.
Decentralized Social (DESO) is the native cryptocurrency powering the Decentralized Social blockchain, a platform designed to support a wide variety of decentralized social media applications. DESO can be used to purchase “social tokens” and NFTs, and to create profiles and posts for Decentralized Social applications.
One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to buy and sell more cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. We announced a process for listing assets, designed in part to accelerate the addition of more cryptocurrencies. We are also investing in new tools to help people understand and explore cryptocurrencies. We launched informational asset pages (see DESO ), as well as a new section of the Coinbase website to answer common questions about crypto.
Customers can sign up for a Coinbase account here to buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store e Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now trade, send, receive, or store DESO today.
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Please note: Coinbase Ventures may be an investor in the crypto projects mentioned here, and additionally, Coinbase may hold such tokens on its balance sheet for operational purposes. A list of Coinbase Ventures investments is available at https://ventures.coinbase.com/. Coinbase intends to maintain its investment in these entities for the foreseeable future and maintains internal policies that address the timing of permissible disposition of any related digital assets, if applicable. All assets, regardless of whether Coinbase Ventures holds an investor or Coinbase holds for operational purposes, are subject to the same strict review guidelines and review process.
This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
Crypto is a new type of asset. Besides potential day to day or hour to hour volatility, each crypto asset has unique features. Make sure you research and understand individual assets before you transact.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Decentralized Social (DESO) is launching on Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Starting Today, Monday December 13, transfer DESO into your Coinbase Pro account ahead of trading. Support for DESO will generally be available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions with certain exceptions as indicated in each asset page here. Trading will begin on or after 9AM Pacific Time (PT), Tuesday December 14, if liquidity conditions are met.
One of the most common requests we receive from customers is to be able to trade more assets on our platform. Per the terms of our listing process, we anticipate supporting more assets that meet our standards over time. Most recently we have added trading support for API3 (API3), Bluezelle (BLZ), Gods Unchained (GODS), Immutable X (IMX), Measurable Data Token (MDT), Ribbon Finance (RBN), Circuits of Value (COVAL), IDEX (IDEX), Moss Carbon Credit (MCO2), Polkastarter (POLS), ShapeShift FOX Token (FOX), Spell Token (SPELL) and SuperFarm (SUPER).
Once sufficient supply ofDESO is established on the platform, trading on our DESO-USD, DESO-USDT and DESO-EUR order books will launch in phases, post-only or auction mode then limit-only or full trading mode. If at any point one of the new order books does not meet our assessment for a healthy and orderly market, we may keep the book in one state for a longer period of time or suspend trading as per our Trading Rules.
We will publish tweets from our Coinbase Pro Twitter account as each order book moves through the phases.
Decentralized Social (DESO) is the native cryptocurrency powering the Decentralized Social blockchain, a platform designed to support a wide variety of decentralized social media applications. DESO can be used to purchase “social tokens” and NFTs, and to create profiles and posts for Decentralized Social applications.
DESO is not yet available on Coinbase.com or via our Consumer mobile apps. We will make a separate announcement if and when this support is added.
You can sign up for a Coinbase Pro account here to start trading. For more information on trading DESO on Coinbase Pro, visit our support page.
### Please note: Coinbase Ventures may be an investor in the crypto projects mentioned here, and additionally, Coinbase may hold such tokens on its balance sheet for operational purposes. A list of Coinbase Ventures investments is available at https://ventures.coinbase.com/. Coinbase intends to maintain its investment in these entities for the foreseeable future and maintains internal policies that address the timing of permissible disposition of any related digital assets, if applicable. All assets, regardless of whether Coinbase Ventures holds an investor or Coinbase holds for operational purposes, are subject to the same strict review guidelines and review process. This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
Crypto is a new type of asset. Besides potential day to day or hour to hour volatility, each crypto asset has unique features. Make sure you research and understand individual assets before you transact.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase.
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Decentralized Social (DESO) is launching on Coinbase Pro was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Today we’re introducing a new way for Coinbase’s global customers to put their crypto to work and earn yield. We are making DeFi more accessible, enabling eligible customers in more than 70 countries to access the attractive yields of DeFi from their Dai with no fees, lockups, or set-up hassle.
Access DeFi from the comfort of your Coinbase account
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is becoming one of the most popular use cases for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies because it enables people to access crypto applications without the need for a centralized intermediary.
However, accessing DeFi protocols can require expensive network fees and involve a somewhat complex user experience. Coinbase is making DeFi more customer friendly and accessible. Eligible users will now be able to access the attractive yields of DeFi from the comfort of their Coinbase account with just a few taps and without the network fees.
Starting today, you’ll be able to earn DeFi yield on Dai, a stablecoin that is designed to be pegged to the US Dollar.
When you opt in to earn DeFi yield, your Dai is deposited into Compound Finance, an industry-leading DeFi protocol. The offered APY varies based on the rates from Compound and will automatically update to reflect changes in the market. Compound’s rates are variable — as an example, during the month of October, the APY for supplying DAI fluctuated between 2.83% and 5.39%.
These higher rates reflect both the unique access to global liquidity and increased risk that can come with DeFi. Though Coinbase monitors these protocols regularly, we cannot guarantee against potential losses. One way that DeFi protocols endeavor to mitigate risk of loss is to use overcollateralization, which means that they hold excess assets to cover potential losses. This is a unique form of investment, so it is always best to make an informed investment decision.
Even when deposited with Compound, your Dai remains available to you on Coinbase at all times, letting you continue to trade and spend as usual. Best of all, Coinbase covers the gas fees typically required to access DeFi protocols and their variable yields.
Get Started Today
DeFi has tremendous potential to help increase economic freedom, and we’re excited to be able to provide a trusted and accessible way to participate. Today’s launch is just the beginning — we are continuing to explore ways to allow our customers to use a wider variety of assets and a greater number of DeFi protocols.
Earning DeFi-powered yield on Dai is now available for eligible Coinbase users in over 70 countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain. DeFi Yield is not currently available for customers in the United States. We will continue to work to bring DeFi Yield to more countries to reach more of our customers.
To get started, visit the Dai asset page in the Coinbase app or on Coinbase.com. In addition to being in an eligible jurisdiction, you must have Dai in your Coinbase wallet in order to enter the DeFi Yield experience. Once you have a Dai balance, go to the Dai asset page, choose the DeFi Yield tile to review, and accept the terms to start earning.
Coinbase makes it easy to earn yield with DeFi was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
By Aaron Henshaw, Head of Coinbase Cloud Engineering
It’s no secret that crypto is gaining mainstream appeal, with the global crypto market cap reaching an all-time high of $3 trillion for the first time, the total value locked in DeFi reaching $250 billion, and 16% of Americans investing in, trading, or otherwise using cryptocurrency in the past year. A growing number of the world’s largest companies are looking to integrate crypto into their applications. Recently, we’ve seen Stripe, Square, Reddit, the NBA and others introducing crypto into their product lines with no signs of this trend slowing down. They all have one thing in common: a need for infrastructure and tools to operate and participate in the ecosystem.
Coinbase Cloud is committed to empowering current and future builders of the cryptoeconomy. Part of this will be building a platform that allows developers to access a suite of primitives like trading, storing, blockchain data access, and staking services. Our vision is to unleash a wave of innovation by offering turnkey solutions, enabling the innovators of tomorrow to do what they do best: build.
Joining Forces
In January 2021, Coinbase welcomed Bison Trails to become the foundational team and platform of Coinbase Cloud. By joining forces, we could accelerate our combined mission of creating a platform for the next wave of blockchain developers and provide a space to learn, participate, and build for the future of crypto.
As the founders of Bison Trails, Joe Lallouz and I saw this as an opportunity to build something bigger than Bison Trails and more expansive for Coinbase. Coinbase’s commitment to being crypto-first undoubtedly contributed to a seamless transition for our team.
The successful transition was also made possible by the support of the Coinbase leadership team, which has been committed to bringing blockchain infrastructure to the masses, as well as making this a great place for founders like Joe and I to continue building and realizing the vision that we set out to accomplish.
As crypto becomes ubiquitous, the products and services of the Web3 era will need to be powered by reliable and secure infrastructure. Coinbase sees this opportunity and is deeply committed to both our success and the growth of the crypto ecosystem.
The Momentum
Crypto infrastructure has been the bread and butter of Bison Trails since its founding. Its infrastructure platform and products are now the foundation of the Coinbase Cloud platform and suite of developer offerings, to equip the next generation of builders with even more powerful solutions.
We power some of the world’s top custodians, exchanges, funds, dapps and token holders. We are building an industry-leading platform for anyone to participate in blockchains (e.g. Celo Validators Groups, Polkadot Validators, eth2 Validators, including helping power Coinbase’s eth2 staking). We also provide reliable infrastructure for read/write data access, empowering the developers of tomorrow to build innovative crypto products and services, scale across blockchains, gain insights into network trends, and more. This frees our customers from having to invest time and resources into developing the necessary engineering, protocol, DevOps, or security competencies to do so reliably in-house.
We are also taking network participation to the next level by engaging deeply with protocol teams. For example, we’ve worked with Solana Foundation and the NEAR council, and supported the Keanu merger, among others.
Let’s take a look at our progress so far:
$30B+ in assets on platform¹ staked across more than 25 protocols as of November 2021
60,000+ nodes across our Participate, Delegate, and Query & Transact products
Doubling the team size, including expanding our dedicated security team
30+ protocols supported for our read/write infrastructure product, Query & Transact. This includes adding support for global distribution across three cloud providers, and multi-user API key management with rate-limiting options to our customers.
Powering features and cross-platform integrations for highly scaled Coinbase products, such as custody integrations for Institutional and eth2 staking for Retail
These metrics are crucial. They measure our impact on the communities we support. Unlike passive custody, assets that are staked are actively used to secure the underlying protocols, making Coinbase Cloud the largest protector of stake-based protocols.
Given the role we play across 30+ protocols, we’ve invested in the security and operational excellence of both our platform and the broader ecosystem. For example, our double-signing protection capability for eth2 has greatly reduced the risk to our platform users of any equivocation or double signing events. It’s for these reasons that companies and ecosystem players like a16z, Current, and Turner Sports have chosen to work with Coinbase Cloud.
Trevor Marshall, CTO of Current, says “the secure, reliable infrastructure and network expertise Bison Trails (Coinbase Cloud) provides has been invaluable to making it possible for Current to be an early, active participant in Polkadot, Karura and Acala and build hybrid financial products that have the potential to improve the financial outcomes of even more people.”
Up Next
We are now preparing for the next phase. We see a future world where every developer, whether part of an early stage project or a leading financial institution, is in some way touching crypto networks. Coinbase Cloud will provide the tools and the platform they need to do that. Our mission is to empower the innovators and help accelerate the Web3 evolution. This is where the world of software is going and we’re excited to lead the herd.
¹The Bison Trails platform is non-custodial.
Nearly one year in: Leading the herd at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Acquisition further underlines Coinbase’s commitment to providing the safest, most secure and most trusted venue for anyone to interact with the cryptoeconomy
Unbound’s best-in-class multi-party-computation expertise will play a foundational role in Coinbase’s product and security roadmap
With the acquisition of Unbound Security, Coinbase will establish a tech center of excellence in Israel, one of the world’s most advanced technology hubs
From its earliest days, Coinbase has focused on protecting our customer’s assets with the strongest, most sophisticated security technology in the world. Over time, our approaches have evolved, but our objective has always been the same: to provide the safest, most secure and most trusted venue for anyone to interact with the cryptoeconomy.
Today, we’re announcing the next phase of our security journey with the acquisition of Unbound Security. Based in Israel, it is a pioneer in a number of cryptographic security technologies, including the emerging field of secure multi-party computation (MPC), a highly advanced technology for which Unbound Security’s co-founder, Yehuda Lindell, is a world leader. With this acquisition, Coinbase not only gains access to some of the world’s most sophisticated cryptographic security experts, including Unbound Security co-founder and current Vice President of Research and Development, Guy Peer, who brings more than 20 years of experience in cryptographic security, but also a presence in Israel, a well-established and rapidly growing technology hub. This presence in Israel will add an additional powerful prong to Coinbase’s global talent acquisition strategy, following on closely to recent thrusts into engineering talent bases such as India, Singapore and Brazil.
Crypto can’t grow without strong cryptography and strong security, but it also needs to be user friendly. Secure multi-party computation is an application of advanced mathematics to enable crypto assets to be stored, transferred and deployed more securely, easily and flexibly than ever before.
The cryptoeconomy is growing exponentially with myriad new use cases such as staking, DeFi, DAOs and NFTs. Unfortunately so are the threat vectors and complexities for participants to safely manage their crypto private keys. Technologies such as MPC will enable these groundbreaking use cases to come to life safely, securely and in a way that’s user friendly. MPC will deliver on this by protecting our customers’ assets with a technique that provides the virtually impenetrable nature of cold, offline storage, with the frictionless convenience of hot, online wallets. Over time MPC capabilities will enable new features across our consumer, institutional and cloud products to participate in the cryptoeconomy.
In addition to the technological expertise that we will gain through this acquisition, we also plan to establish a tech center of excellence in Israel that will ensure that Coinbase is always at the bleeding edge of security and blockchain technology. We’ve long recognized Israel as a hot bed of strong technology and cryptography talent, and are excited to continue to grow our team with some of the best and brightest minds in these fields. The Unbound Security team will form the nucleus of this new research facility, which we plan to grow over time.
We’re always proud to welcome top talent to Coinbase and the Unbound Security team represents the very best expertise in its field. We look forward to working with them over time to move the entire state of cryptographic security forward and to continue delivering the highest levels of security to our customers. Please join us in welcoming the team to Coinbase.
This acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the coming months.
Coinbase to acquire leading cryptographic security company, Unbound Security was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Starting today, Voyager Token (VGX) is available on Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now trade, send, receive, or store VGX in most Coinbase-supported regions, with certain exceptions indicated in each asset page here. Trading for these assets is also supported on Coinbase Pro.
Voyager Token (VGX) is an Ethereum token that’s used to reward and incentivize use of the Voyager centralized exchange. On Voyager, VGX holders can earn staking rewards, receive cashback on trades, and more.
One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to buy and sell more cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. We announced a process for listing assets, designed in part to accelerate the addition of more cryptocurrencies. We are also investing in new tools to help people understand and explore cryptocurrencies. We launched informational asset pages (see VGX), as well as a new section of the Coinbase website to answer common questions about crypto.
Customers can sign up for a Coinbase account here to buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store e Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now trade, send, receive, or store VGX today.
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Please note: Coinbase Ventures may be an investor in the crypto projects mentioned here, and additionally, Coinbase may hold such tokens on its balance sheet for operational purposes. A list of Coinbase Ventures investments is available at https://ventures.coinbase.com/. Coinbase intends to maintain its investment in these entities for the foreseeable future and maintains internal policies that address the timing of permissible disposition of any related digital assets, if applicable. All assets, regardless of whether Coinbase Ventures holds an investor or Coinbase holds for operational purposes, are subject to the same strict review guidelines and review process.
This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
Crypto is a new type of asset. Besides potential day to day or hour to hour volatility, each crypto asset has unique features. Make sure you research and understand individual assets before you transact.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Voyager Token (VGX) is launching on Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
