Tag: Leading

  • Nearly one year in: Leading the herd at Coinbase

    Nearly one year in: Leading the herd at Coinbase

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    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.



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  • Coinbase to acquire leading cryptographic security company, Unbound Security

    Coinbase to acquire leading cryptographic security company, Unbound Security

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    • 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.

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