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Posted on March 21, 2019Reliability Engineering at Coinbase
Why Reliability Engineering?
Why is Reliability Engineering relevant at a company like Coinbase? Why would we want to build a Reliability Engineering team?
“Our goal is to make Coinbase the most trusted and easiest to use digital currency exchange.”
-Brian Armstrong, Co-founder & CEO
It all comes back to what our CEO Brian Armstrong said about Coinbase wanting to be the most trusted. Our goal in the cryptocurrency industry is to create an open financial system for the world — and part of that requires us to build the most trusted digital currency exchange. In order to be the most trusted exchange, we need to be the most reliable. Being reliable is a competitive advantage in our industry, while being unreliable is a serious risk to our business.
Before you get too deep into this article, please note that we’re actively hiring great Reliability Engineers, so if any of this sounds interesting to you please head over to our Senior Reliability Engineer job posting here.
What is Reliability Engineering?
The mission of the Reliability Engineering team at Coinbase is:
“Help engineers design & keep their promises in production.”
The word “promise” in our mission statement is a reference to Promise Theory which was invented by Mark Burgess. While we use many of the principles from the Google SRE books, we found Promise Theory to be more human-friendly than the term “Service Level Objective” which is a bit jargon-y. Based on the investigations into safety and reliability by people like Sidney Dekker and companies such as Toyota (see the Toyota Way), we consider reliability to be ultimately a human challenge. For this reason we preferred to reference a concept which every human already understands — that of making and keeping promises.
Major differences between Reliability Engineering at Coinbase vs Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at some other companies:
- We are generalist software engineers first and foremost. We focus on solving challenges by writing better software rather than adding more and more humans to push buttons. Everyone on the team is a strong software engineer, working on multiple software systems in a variety of programming languages.
- We do not have front-line pager responsibility. We are on-call for the systems that we ourselves own (e.g. the Coinbase observability stack), but we are not the first line of incident response for other teams. Service and product teams have their own pager rotations.
We like to apply the metaphor of ‘teaching a person to fish vs giving them a fish’ to how we operate — our mission is to “teach teams to fish” in terms of reliability. This is in contrast to “giving them a fish” by handling front-line pager duties on their behalf. Another way of putting it is that our goal is to up-level every engineering team at Coinbase to be self-sufficient in Reliability Engineering.
How do Reliability Engineers work?
One of the important things to realize about reliability engineering is that it is inherently cross-cutting throughout the organization. Reliability is not itself a functional silo — it is a value and a business output. Our customers are every single engineering team at Coinbase. Since we work with so many customers, we have defined different models of engagement to meet their needs:
- Advisory. This is answering questions, or responding to ad-hoc requests without formal deliverables. For example responding to “Help me monitor/scale/improve my thing” questions in Slack, or jumping into production incidents to support responders.
- Consulting. We often run structured reliability workshops and pairing sessions with other teams. In these engagements, we have a shared goal (in our case, OKR) with the team we’re consulting with — thus there is a measurable outcome. While consulting engagements are formal, they are typically part-time endeavours.
- Embedding. Sometimes teams will need full-time reliability support from our engineers, and they request that we physically sit and work with them, participating in their standups, sprint plannings, etc. This is where we use embedding. Similar to Consulting, this work has a shared goal and measurable outcome (OKR) — the difference is the reliability engineer is a temporary (typically, one calendar quarter) member of the customer team.
Beyond the various ways we engage with customers, we follow a standard “agile” software engineering process. We have a weekly planning meeting to update our Kanban board, conduct monthly retrospectives and hold daily standups. Longer-term strategy and measurements are captured in quarterly OKRs which we derive from customer feedback and internal discussion.
Introducing the Coinbase Reliability Engineering Team
The Reliability Team was founded in 2018 with one engineer (Luke Demi) and myself (Niall O’Higgins) as manager. Since then, we’ve grown to 7 engineers and shipped a lot of improvements.
In the words of folks on the team, here are some accomplishments we can speak about publicly as well as impressions and experiences from working on reliability!
Luke Demi
After joining Coinbase in 2016, my initial efforts within the company focused on building self-service infrastructure for engineers. However in 2017 as interest in cryptocurrency surged, Coinbase began to experience outages across our systems. Solving these types of reliability problems excited me, so I dove in head first to get to the bottom of these issues.
We were able to survive 2017, but it was clear that in order to withstand future surges and provide a reliable experience for our customers we would need to make reliability a core component of the engineering culture at Coinbase.
I find the Reliability Team exciting because we’re able to both advise teams on best practices for choosing reliability indicators (Service Level Indicators AKA SLIs) and promises (AKA SLOs) as well as build the tools that let engineers understand the performance of their systems in production.
Maksym Naboka
I joined Coinbase in July 2018. Being the 3rd engineer on the Reliability Team was an amazing experience. There are so many things I love about the company and I’d like to highlight few of them:
- An opportunity to work with / learn from smart and talented people.
- Project ownership. An engineer on the Reliability Team owns a project all the way through from design to shipping.
- Ability to contribute to Open Source.
- Learn, learn and learn. Coinbase provides so many opportunities to learn new technology. It feels like we are utilizing every spare minute to learn new things! We have Lunch & Learn sessions with guests from leading technology companies, every engineer has an annual educational budget to go to conferences or take online classes.
- Delicious meals on site :)
Amy Li
When I first joined the Reliability Team in November 2018, I was under the impression that I would be thrown into the deep end of blockchain — drowning in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and smart contracts. Colleagues also warned me of endless firefighting and nightmarish on-call rotations. Fortunately, this was not the case.
The Reliability Team doesn’t work with blockchains directly and aren’t the first ones being paged for every single incident. Each Coinbase team owns the daily operations of their specific products or services. This allows for distributed knowledge across the organization.
As a new college graduate I initially felt overwhelmed, but everyone on the team has been incredibly supportive and willing to share their knowledge. Within a month, Niall and I improved our incident management system by integrating it with JIRA. I wrote my first design document to further integrate PagerDuty with our incident management system and I am continually making incremental changes to our system.
One of the most important things I’ve learned is that working with amazing team members is priceless. The Reliability Team is a group of curious, empathetic, and intelligent individuals and there’s no other group I would rather be with for five days a week.
Paul Henry
The most interesting part of being on the Reliability Team for me is our high-level perspective across the organization. Since we are not tasked with handling day-to-day operations of any specific Coinbase product (Coinbase.com, Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Wallet, etc), we can focus on improving the ability for teams to observe and understand their systems. This means that teams can move faster, incidents are resolved quicker, and there’s a decentralization of knowledge across the organization.
Here’s some examples of improvements that I’ve contributed to over the past year:
- Writing lightweight stats, tracing, and logging libraries for the various languages in use across the organization.
- Contributing to “paved roads” for various languages and ensuring that developers have a good starting point for new services, with sane defaults.
- Introducing new vendors (such as Datadog) to bring more dimensions of observability, unlocking new ways of monitoring systems.
- Bringing a perspective of reliability to technology choices made by teams and helping them ask the right questions.
- Contributing to our deployment tooling to integrate high level monitoring by default on all services.
- Enabling the use of gRPC across the organization through client generation in various languages and integration into our AWS architecture. See blog post “gRPC to AWS Lambda: Is it Possible?”
In addition to shared tooling, we engage with many teams across the organization by running workshops, review sessions, and office hours.
Workshops are hands-on sessions that focus on topics like observability tooling and promise construction, within the context of that team’s services or problem domain.
Review sessions happen both early in the design process for services and later when they are nearing production. These reviews do not act as a gate or “green check mark” for teams, but instead make sure that they are asking the right questions and highlighting ways that the reliability team can level up teams across the organization.
Office hours are open time every week for any engineer to bring problems or feedback to our team by pairing with an engineer. Topics usually include: how to build effective monitors and dashboards, integrating tracing or metrics libraries, what database should I use for this particular problem, and more.
At the end of the day, my favorite part about the Reliability Team is the diverse set of engineers we have. The breadth and depth of knowledge shared by everyone is a great support structure for tackling a problem of any scale.
Jordan Sitkin
I have an unusual background for an infrastructure engineer. I studied graphic design in school and worked for the first half of my career as a designer. Joining the Reliability Team was, for me, the latest step in a long, ongoing journey away from the front end. I’ve really enjoyed the new challenges I’ve faced on this team and have been pleasantly surprised at how often my experience as a designer ends up being relevant here.
My favorite part about being on the Reliability Team is being close to where the excitement is happening across the company. The greatest need for reliability expertise is often around new product launches or new-found success of some existing product. We’ve been pursuing a new model of embedding reliability engineers in other teams where their expertise is needed most. I’m personally currently embedded in the Consumer team, which is responsible for Coinbase.com and the Coinbase mobile apps. I’ve enjoyed feeling close to the front lines of product development while still focusing on infrastructure.
Another rewarding aspect of being on the Reliability Team has been turning our work into conference talks. Over the past year I had the chance to speak at MongoDB World and QCon about designing load testing strategies. I had never given a talk before, so this was a great learning opportunity for me and I ended up having a lot of fun doing it.
Working on the Reliability Team is one of the most fun positions at Coinbase because we get to be a part of so many different initiatives and projects across the company. We’ve got a great diversity of expertise on the team. I’ve never learned so much so quickly.
Reliability Engineering and the Future
In the past year, our team has helped all of Coinbase build a culture of reliability in the following ways:
- Moving the entire engineering team from a reactive stance on reliability (firefighting, etc.) to a proactive one (installing smoke detectors) with service level indicators and promises.
- Providing a world-class observability stack comprised of three pillars — tracing, metrics and logs.
- Designing and implementing high-performance infrastructure services.
We look forward to doing much more over the next year such as:
- Building the serverless foundation to accelerate feature development.
- Helping move to a service oriented architecture by building core infrastructure such as the service mesh.
- Leveling up every single team in terms of performance engineering, quality and incident response.
If any of this sounds interesting to you please head over to our Senior Reliability Engineer job posting here.
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.
Reliability Engineering 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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Posted on March 20, 2019Is an end to late payments finally in sight?
The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, last week announced plans to “tackle the scourge of late payments” to small businesses, including a requirement for listed companies to report on their performance in annual reports and accounts.
So, how did we arrive at this point and what needs to be done?
When legislation that requires businesses to report on their payment practices was first passed, there was lots of uncertainty as to whether it would help clamp down on late payments at all, and whether that legislation would be the extent of the Government's efforts.
It is now clear that the Government has not dropped this issue from its agenda. This is great news as late payments have been a thorn in the side of SMEs for many years, with many big businesses accused of treating their suppliers as an additional line of credit. Recent GoCardless research found that more than 80% of small business owners say payment uncertainty means they can’t grow their business the way they want to
Bacs Payment Schemes has calculated that 5.7 million SMEs in the UK are owed about £13 billion in total. Research from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) suggests that tackling the problem could add £2.5 billion to the UK economy and keep an extra 50,000 businesses open each year.
These stats are backed up by Small Business and Productivity, published by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) committee.
To quote the report, late payments “inhibit the ability of SMEs to grow, affecting overall UK productivity. Late payments are built into the business models of too many companies, leading to many SMEs losing staff, profits and their businesses. This is totally unacceptable, unfair and constitutes a particularly disgraceful form of market abuse."
The Chancellor’s announcement
The Chancellor wants companies to nominate a specific non-executive director to take responsibility for the supply chain. Under Business Secretary, Greg Hands, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will lead the consultation and introduction of the new regulations for listed entries – though details of the time frame involved have not yet been revealed.
Could, then, the end of late payments finally be in sight?
The FSB certainly seems to think so. Its National Chairman, Mike Cherry, said: “Poor payment practices by big businesses towards their smaller suppliers are rife and pernicious. Four out of five small businesses have been paid late, and we told the Chancellor that this was the moment to act, to tackle this scourge once and for all.”
“The end of late payments can’t come soon enough, to bolster small businesses at a time when they are in great need of support and a lift in confidence.”
What else needs to be done?
If we were to put a series of measures on the table, these would include all medium and large companies being required to sign the Prompt Payment Code (as outlined by the FSB's ‘Fair Pay, Fair Play’ campaign), and adopting statutory payments terms of no more than 30 days. And the Small Business Commissioner should also be given powers to fine persistent offenders.
There must also be a board level conversation and all businesses need to step up to the plate and be open and transparent. After all, the economy thrives when small, medium and large businesses work together.
It's clear, though, that there will be no quick win here. Earlier this year, GoCardless updated on the duty to report on payment practices and performance legislation and we found that although progress was being made – challenges and issues remained and the initiative had to be viewed as a stepping stone to greater measures to protect smaller organisations.
With this in mind, the claim that the Chancellor’s plans will mark the end of late payments seems somewhat optimistic. In the absence of statutory maximum payment terms and/or fines for late payment, there will always be a risk that SME suppliers will be forced to accept lengthy payment terms and/or face a delay in getting their invoices paid.
It seems almost inevitable that it will take longer for the situation on the ground to improve by continuing to focus on promoting better practices through transparency and reporting.
It will now be interesting to read the response that the Government is due to publish in relation to last year's call for evidence on ways it can eliminate bad payment practices.
All eyes will, therefore, be on how many of these proposals the Government will seek to implement.
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Posted on March 20, 2019Presenting Our Holiday Scratch Card Winners!
At Payoneer, we’re passionate supporters of the entrepreneurial spirit. Our community is full of amazing individuals who are creating their own businesses and paving their own roads to success, and we always strive to celebrate their achievements around the globe.
In honor of this year’s Holiday Scratch Card Competition – an end of year event in which sellers from all over the world were eligible to receive prizes of up to $1,000 – we wanted to give a special mention to some of our top winners and share some of their inspiring stories from 2018, as well as their plans for the coming year.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Wang Zhonglei
In 2018, I developed an understanding of the e-commerce world, specifically Amazon. This year, my goal is to focus on developing new products for my store while branching into new markets. I also want to set up my own team to further optimize my product and supply chain structures.
Disha Sharma
2018 was a great year for me, as I was able to learn a lot about affiliate marketing, freelancing and graphic design. I also started my career with the Amazon affiliate program. In 2019, I want to start drop shipping and start my own Amazon business.
Reid Aune
For me, the highlight of 2018 was when I got my first product listed on Amazon and made my first sale. In 2019, my main goal is to expand my business and to create my own private label product for sale.
Nguyen Manh
For me, 2018 was filled with highlights, including when I made my first sale. In what felt like no time at all, my revenues reached $15,000 a month. In 2019, I plan on stabilizing my business by renting a store to hold my supplies and by learning from more experienced Amazon sellers.
Eiji Sato
In 2018, I resigned from my previous job and started selling on Amazon. It was a difficult transition, but I eventually got to the point where I was earning more than my previous salary. My goal in 2019 is to establish my own company and reach a monthly volume of over $100k.
Sergei Polianskii
2018 was a special year for me because I started to work on Amazon. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made, and my goal is to continue building on my business in 2019.
The post Presenting Our Holiday Scratch Card Winners! appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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Posted on March 18, 2019Stellar Lumens (XLM) now available on Coinbase
Starting today, Coinbase supports Stellar Lumens (XLM) at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store XLM. Please note that inbound transfers and many sends require the specification of an XLM destination tag.
XLM will be available for customers in most jurisdictions, but will not initially be available for residents of the United Kingdom or the state of New York.
Stellar’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumen (XLM), powers the Stellar payment network. Stellar aims to connect banks, payment systems and individuals quickly and reliably. Since its launch in 2014, its vision has been to unite the world’s financial infrastructure so that money can flow quickly and cheaply between banks, businesses, and people. The Internet connected the world’s computers so that information could be shared globally. Stellar aims to do the same for money.
One of the most common requests we receive from customers is to be able to trade more assets on our platform. With the recent announcement of our new listing process, we anticipate listing more assets over time that meet our standards. We are also investing in new tools to help people understand and explore cryptocurrencies. We launched informational asset pages (see XLM here), as well as a new section of the Coinbase website to answer common questions about crypto.
You can sign up for a Coinbase account here to buy, sell or convert XLM today.
Stellar Lumens (XLM) now available on 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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Posted on March 18, 2019Amazon is Cracking Down on Counterfeit Products — Here’s What eSellers Need to Know
Fake goods cost retail brands real money. Today, over 2 million products are listed each day on marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba, making it so that at any given point, there are over 1 billion counterfeit goods listed online. According to the International Trademark Association (INTA), the counterfeit goods industry is expected to grow to over $4.2 billion by 2022. Beyond harming brand reputation and revenue generation, counterfeit goods can hurt consumers.
The war on counterfeit goods recently escalated after marketplace leader Amazon announced to investors that they could put their company at risk. This is due to the increased pressure from brands to crackdown on the sale of counterfeit goods or risk being held accountable.
Want to learn more about what Amazon is doing to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods? Continue reading below:
The Problem of Counterfeit Amazon Goods
According to The Counterfeit Report (TCR), an advocacy group that works with brands to detect fake goods, around 58,000 counterfeit products have been found on Amazon since May 2016. While more than 35,000 items have been removed, the problem continues to grow. According to the 2018 Global Brand Counterfeiting Report, the amount of total counterfeiting globally reached to USD 1.2 trillion in 2017 and is projected to reach USD 1.82 trillion by the year 2020.
Amazon’s Warning to Investors
Amazon recognizes the impact of counterfeit goods and the risk they pose.
In a recent annual report, Amazon warned investors that their main problem lies in their inability “to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods.”
The main culprits putting Amazon at risk are the third-party merchants. The problem here is that 52% of all products sold on the site were from third-party merchants, making this their largest customer base.
What’s most frustrating to consumers — and Amazon — is that some of the counterfeit items bear the seemingly trustworthy Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) label. The reality is that while the FBA label only indicates that Amazon serves as the distributing agency, it also provides many consumers with a false sense of buyer security.
Enter Amazon’s Project Zero
In the past, Amazon only reacted to fraudulent sellers after numerous complaints, or if an official brand filed a counterfeit report. This caused dissatisfaction among many eSellers, as they reported feeling as though Amazon didn’t care enough about the seriousness of the situation.
The retail giant has launched a new anti-counterfeiting initiative called “Project Zero” that aims to tackle the counterfeit problem while protecting sellers and consumers alike.
According to the company, the program uses three tools:
- Automated protections— Brands provide their logos, trademarks and other key brand data. Amazon then uses AI to scan over 5 billion product listing updates daily to find suspected counterfeits.
- Self-service counterfeit removal tools — In the past, brands would report a counterfeit product to Amazon, and they would then investigate these reports and take action. Now brands can remove counterfeit listings themselves.
- Product serialization — This service gives a unique code for every unit produced. Brands then put these codes on each product. Every time a listed product is purchased, Amazon can scan the serial code and verify the authenticity of the purchase.
The Good News and the Bad News
The good news is that Amazon appears to be making a very concerted effort to stop the sale of counterfeit products. This is a blessing for legitimate sellers looking to provide top quality goods on the online marketplace.
Amazon has been running pilots with several brands — including Vera Bradley, mobile accessories maker Kenu, and anti-anxiety products manufacturer ThunderWorks — with positive results. Since the new solution was implemented, Amazon has been able to thwart 100 times more suspected counterfeit products compared to what the site reactively removed based on brands’ reports.
The bad news is that protections aren’t yet widely available.
While the program is now being opened up to additional brand owners, there is a waitlist and added fee associated with joining. Once a seller joins “Project Zero” they do not get a 100% guarantee.
While Amazon is committed to “providing brands with an unprecedented level of responsibility”, they also emphasize that sellers “must maintain a high bar for accuracy in order to maintain their Project Zero privileges.” This includes training and monitoring to avoid misuse, among other requirements.
What eSellers Can Do About Counterfeit Sales
The steps that Amazon is taking will no doubt benefit eSellers in the future. For now, however, the problem is still a very real one that they must deal with. While Amazon may not be able to drive counterfeiters out of business or entirely off their platform, they are making it harder for fraudsters to succeed, providing consumers with a stronger sense of protection.
If your brand suffers revenue loss and brand reputation damage due to the sale of counterfeit goods on Amazon, the best course of action is to apply to “Project Zero” while taking actions to protect your brand and customers.
At the end of the day, your eSeller brand is your reputation — and you can’t put a price on that.
Learn how Payoneer helps you sell anywhere in the world
The post Amazon is Cracking Down on Counterfeit Products — Here’s What eSellers Need to Know appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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Posted on March 17, 2019GoCardless and Zuora go live in Australia with seamless recurring payments
Today we’re pleased to announce that Zuora is partnering with GoCardless to help Zuora customers take recurring payments in Australia!
GoCardless has been processing payments in Australia since 2018, and with the addition of the BECS scheme to the Zuora partnership, they’re uniquely positioned to support the growth of the Australian subscription economy and solve the common issues that enterprise businesses face through collecting recurring payments.
According to Iman Ghodosi, Zuora's GM Asia Pacific Region:
“Collaborating with GoCardless means we can offer our customers, and their customers, more flexibility and scalability when it comes to subscribing to new goods and services. By providing more payment options than ever before, companies are able to tailor their offerings to attract a wider range of subscribers, on more attractive and profitable terms.”
Australia: a growing market for subscription models
The Australian market has been experiencing a drastic shift in the payments landscape over the past few years, with more than two-thirds of Australian businesses planning to adopt a subscription model by 2018-2019, according to the ANZ Subscription Shift, a 2016 survey by Ovum for Zuora.
Additional findings from the Zuora survey include:
- In the next two to three years, more than half (55%) of ANZ enterprises plan to follow a hybrid direct-to-consumer engagement model, up from 33% in 2016
- Almost half (47%) of enterprises are looking to change their goods and services pricing due to the integration of connected life offerings
- The ANZ Subscription Economy is projected to grow in the range of 2.7% annually until 2020
With an average of 44 Direct Debit transactions per person each year, Australian consumers use this bank-to-bank payment method for a wide range of payments including utility bills, childcare, sports club memberships, insurance, housing, and online subscriptions.
Additionally, businesses often pay via Direct Debit for their ongoing relationships with partners or suppliers, like marketing agencies, accountants or wholesalers. Between 2013 and 2016 the number of Direct Debits increased by 30% (Reserve Bank of Australia, Consumer Payments Survey, April 2017).
In Australia, the annual value of transactions processed through Direct Debit is almost 6 trillion AUD. This is 35.9% of all non-cash transactions (Bank of International Settlement, October 2017). In the past six years, the volume of Direct Debit transactions has increased by more than 50% reaching more than one billion in 2016.
A recent article from The Financial Review explores in more detail why Australians are ditching credit cards in favour of 'buy now pay later services'.
Why is Direct Debit the right solution?
Direct Debit is the perfect solution for collecting payments, and it seems that customers in Australia agree; almost 36% of non-cash transactions were made through Direct Debit in 2017, with trends indicating that this number will grow in 2018.
Direct Debit has some key advantages over other payment methods. Designed specifically to handle recurring payments, Direct Debit is ideal for the subscription economy. It’s a bank-to-bank payment method, where the customer pre-authorises the merchant to collect payments directly from their bank account. It solves the problem of involuntary churn and drastically reduces the amount of time invested in managing the process through automating payment collections.
Unlike credit and debit cards, Direct Debit never expires, and bank accounts can’t be physically lost or stolen. What’s more, failure rates with Direct Debit payments are as low as 0.5% - and that figure is almost always due to the simple reason of customers having insufficient funds. GoCardless enhances Direct Debit, providing a payment solution specifically designed for companies using the subscription business model. The GoCardless product uses Direct Debit to support those key metrics driving success in the subscription economy.
The GoCardless/Zuora partnership: A boon for Australian subscription businesses
The ability to offer Direct Debit as a subscription payment method in Australia is a significant milestone for Zuora, as they continue to grow in the region. A recent survey by Zuora revealed that 70% of Australian and New Zealand businesses are planning to make the shift to a subscription model in the next two to three years.
This move toward a subscription billing model is further supported by the same research, showing that Australians and New Zealanders spend an average of $660 AUD per month on subscriptions or recurring goods and services.
As GoCardless CEO and founder Hiroki puts it:
“As more and more businesses become international, they face endless frustrations in managing payments across multiple territories. Our partnership with Zuora has enabled us to reach an international market and offer our automatic payment solution to global businesses through one of the world’s most popular subscription billing platforms. We’re thrilled to be taking our partnership to the next level and look forward to bringing our solution to Zuora’s customers in Australia and beyond.”
The GoCardless integration with Zuora is another key milestone in our efforts to solve the problem of late payments around the world.
GoCardless for Zuora is now live in the following countries and schemes:
Country Scheme Currency Eurozone SEPA EUR (€) UK Bacs GBP (£) Australia BECS AUD ($) -
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Posted on March 15, 2019Coinbase Pro Market Structure Update
On Friday, March 22 @ 6:00 pm PDT, Coinbase Pro will implement a set of changes to further optimize the market health of our platform. These changes are designed to increase liquidity, enable better price discovery for trades, and to make price movements smoother. This will lead to a more efficient market and increase trading opportunities for all of our customers. The changes include:
- New fee structure that is designed to increase liquidity by reducing the delta between maker and taker fees
- Updated order maximums designed to help protect customers from large price movements
- New order increment (“tick”) sizes aimed at improving market structure
- Turning off stop market orders
- Adding market order protection points
New Fee Schedule
The calculation for volume tiers will continue to be based off trailing 30 day volume. You can also see your trailing 30 day volume within Pro.
Updated Order Maximums
We periodically review our maximum order size, which is designed to mitigate the impact of large orders on market liquidity. The latest order maximums can be found on our markets summary page.
Updated Tick Sizes
The tick size of a market is the minimum increment between orders. We will be decreasing the tick size on the following 5 books: ETC-USD, ETC-EUR, ETC-GBP, LTC-BTC, ETC-BTC
The latest tick sizes for all products can be found on our markets summary.
Deprecating Stop Market Orders
Coinbase Pro and Prime will no longer support stop market orders. All stop orders must now be submitted as limit orders and include a limit price. All currently open stop market orders will be canceled on Friday, March 22 @ 6:00 pm PDT.
Adding Market Order Protection Points
Coinbase Pro and Prime will introduce a 10% market protection point for all market orders. Market orders that move the price in excess of 10% will stop executing and return a partial fill. For example: a market buy submitted when the last trade price is $4,000 will only fill at price levels below $4,400. Protection points help prevent large orders from causing more than 10% slippage.
Scheduled Downtime
Coinbase Pro will be offline Friday, March 22 @ 6:00 pm PDT to 6:30 pm PDT. Please subscribe to the Coinbase Pro Status Page to receive updates on the market closing and re-openings.
- 3/22 @ 6:00 pm PDT — Downtime begins, all open market stop orders cleared
- 3/22 @ 6:30 pm PDT — Markets restarted
- 3/22 @ 6:30 pm PDT — New fee schedule and market structure rules go into effect
- 3/22 @ 6:30 pm PDT — Markets will enter limit-only mode
- 3/22 @ 6:30 pm PDT — Normal trading activity will resume per our trading rules.
Coinbase is focused on providing our customers the best liquidity and trading experiences. We continue to refine our market structure over time, using a principle based goal of generating the highest value to our customers.
You can sign up for a Coinbase Pro account here to start trading.
Coinbase Pro Market Structure Update 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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Posted on March 15, 2019Generating Leads for Your Freelance Business
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Shlomit Harary, founder of SHEvooking
As a freelancer, you are more than an expert graphic designer, web developer or copywriter; you are the CEO, CMO, and CFO of your business. As such, you are the one for managing, maintaining and growing your lead pipeline.
These tasks are arguably the hardest part of being a freelancer, and the ones you have to invest the most time in.
To ensure your revenue generation grows, you need to continually create leads for your business. But how do you do that when you’re busy doing everything else?
Generating Leads at Little to No Cost
Lead generation campaigns are often pushed to the side by freelancers because of the cost associated. While lead generation campaigns do traditionally cost money, some campaigns cost little to nothing (and can yield surprisingly positive results).
While the ROI on such leads is high, it may take longer to convert these leads.
Encourage Referrals
Referrals are a great way to generate leads for your business, as they are often provided by customers that have an established professional relationship with you and are satisfied with the quality of work you create. Because of this, leads generated through referrals are often the highest converting ones.
In an ideal world, your customers would shout your name from the rooftops to anyone looking for a service provider with your skill set. In reality, you need to remind your customers to spread the word about your services.
The way to do that is by continually touching base with clients, even after completing a project with them.
Beyond nurturing a long-lasting relationship, a little promotion can go a long way – consider offering a special discount or freebie to clients that spread the word about your freelance business. Aside from potentially generating new leads, it just may bring past clients back to you for repeat business.
Be Active Online
Most freelancers will find that their target audience is available online on social networks and forums. To generate leads for your freelance business without spending money, all you need to do is be active on these forums.
Many businesses often seek freelancers and being active online is a great way to help bring businesses to you. If you are a content writer, for example, seek out local and global Facebook and LinkedIn groups for content writers. If you are a web developer, be active in relevant forums on Reddit and Quora.
The key to generating leads by being active online is by sharing your experience and knowledge for free. This is the way to establish yourself as a trusted authority in your domain as well as build relationships in today’s digital age.
While answering questions and sharing your experience, you will find people will begin tagging you when businesses seek freelancers, slowly building your lead pipeline.
Website Lead Capture Form
If you have a website and are looking to generate leads without investing money or time, a great way to do that is by having a website lead capture form.
Tips for having an effective lead capture form on your website:
- Make sure your form is clearly visible – The key to this is having your lead generation form, if not a pop-up, placed above the fold.
- Have a pop-up – Pop-ups are a great way to grab attention. However, the key is launching them at the right time. Do not set it the pop-up launch right when a visitor comes to your website. Give potential leads time to explore your site, that way, when your pop up does come up, there will be a higher chance of them filling out their information
- Minimize friction – Leads do not know a lot about your business and as such, will not be keen to give you a lot of information. Ask for the bare minimum to increase the chances of capturing their information.
- Showcase compliance – People today are protective over their personal information. Make sure to clearly outline what the data you collect will be used for and how you will protect it.
Investing in Lead Generation Campaigns
As a marketing consultant, this is one of the things that need to be placed in the “do as I say, not as I do” category. This is because launching campaigns for your own freelance business always falls to the bottom of the to-do list (if it’s there at all). However, if you are not generating as many leads organically as you would like, it may be precisely what you need.
When planning a paid lead generation campaign, make sure to build a budget that is manageable for your business and will yield results. For example, if you want to promote your business on Google, having a $5 a day budget will likely not be effective.
Remember that the visitor to lead ratio is often around 2-3%. That means that to get two leads, you will need 100 visitors to your website – something $5 won’t necessarily get you.
Pick a Niche Audience to Target
Launching a niche campaign is a great way to generate new leads in a particular domain or one that requires a specific skill set. This is because when targeting your niche, you can hyper-focus on the exact client you are looking for and create an offering that is expertly suited for their needs.
It is often more useful to launch a niche campaign. The alternative of offering all your services to all possible clients requires more resources, making it ineffective if your goal is immediate lead generation.
For example, I work with clients in a variety of industries and offer a range of services including strategic consulting, go-to-market-strategy creation and complete brand repositioning. If I were to take my own advice, I would launch a campaign specific to one audience – e.g., B2B SaaS startups – and focus on a single service that I believe they can benefit from.
Collateral Needed for Your Campaign
When creating your campaign, it is essential to have the marketing collateral to make it as effective as possible. Once you have decided on your niche, you will need to have a special offer for that niche and a primary message relayed throughout the campaign.
The collateral you need for your niche campaign will depend on the type of campaign you are launching. If you are launching a campaign on Google, you will need creative copy and banners according to Google’s ad sizes; if you are launching a campaign on social media, you will need to have a well-maintained business page and a different set of banners and creative copy.
Regardless of the campaign you are launching, if you want the campaign to be lead-generation focused, there are a few things you will always benefit from having:
- A dedicated landing page – The most effective way to capture leads is on a dedicated landing page. If you direct potential clients to your website, you risk losing them – especially if your campaign is niche and your website is general. Have a dedicated landing page that has a clear and concise lead capture form at the top.
- Offer valuable gated content – If you are looking to generate leads, remember that potential clients will not give you their email address just because you asked for it. Create a unique offer or valuable gated content that potential customers will want enough to consider giving you their email address.
- Follow-up lead funnel – Once you have your lead, make sure you follow up with them by creating a follow-up funnel. If you are sharing gated content via email, send it within a timely manner. If you are not sending the gated content by email, have a follow-up funnel sent to your leads after 24 hours, three days and one week to remind them of your service or special offer.
Do Not Over-Promise and Under-Deliver.
The most important thing to remember when generating leads is that you need to be able to deliver on what you promise. If you don’t, you may get a few leads as clients, but they will not be coming back to you, nor will they refer you to others.
That is why, as a freelancer, you need to make sure to take on projects you can handle timewise and skill wise.
Do not launch massive lead-generation campaigns if you cannot handle the influx of leads and potential work that they may bring. Doing so may cause your freelance business more harm than good (although there is something to be said about conveying to clients that you are busy and not always immediately available to them).
Shlomit Harary is the founder of SHEvooking and an experienced marketing consultant who does not employ enough of these tips for her own freelance business. The post Generating Leads for Your Freelance Business appeared first on The Payoneer Blog.
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Posted on March 14, 2019Announcing XRP Support on Coinbase Wallet
Starting today, you can now store your XRP directly in the Coinbase Wallet app.
Our goal with Coinbase Wallet is to create the world’s leading user-custodied crypto wallet. Coinbase Wallet already supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, and over 100,000 different ERC20 tokens and ERC721 collectibles built on Ethereum. Adding support for XRP is an important next step in that direction.
The new Wallet update with XRP support will roll out to all users on iOS and Android over the next week. To activate your XRP wallet — all you need to do is tap ‘Receive’ on the main wallet tab and select XRP. The XRP ledger requires that all wallets have a minimum balance of 20 XRP, so please fund your account with at least 20 XRP.
Wallet also supports the XRP Testnet to aid developers and power users. You can switch to the testnet from the Advanced Settings section of the Settings tab.
And, as always, your private keys are encrypted on your phone using Secure Enclave technology, to bring you best-in-class security. This specialized hardware is considered the most secure way to safeguard private data on mobile devices.
As announced previously, we’re also working on support for other popular cryptocurrencies.
If you have only ever used the primary Coinbase app (or Coinbase.com), we encourage you to check out Coinbase Wallet. The Coinbase Wallet app is Coinbase’s user-controlled cryptocurrency wallet. With Coinbase.com, you can buy crypto and Coinbase stores it (along with your private keys) for you; with Coinbase Wallet, you store your own crypto (safeguarded by a private key that only you know). To learn more, visit our website.
We hope you enjoy using Coinbase Wallet. Your feedback helps us make Wallet better for everyone. You can reach us at wallet.support@coinbase.com.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Announcing XRP Support on Coinbase Wallet 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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Posted on March 13, 2019Stellar Lumens (XLM) is launching on Coinbase Pro
Stellar Lumens (XLM) is now available on Coinbase Pro (Updated)
Support for XLM will be immediately available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.
After 1pm PT on March 13, 2019, we will begin accepting inbound transfers of XLM to Coinbase Pro. We will accept deposits for approximately 12 hours prior to enabling full trading. Please note that inbound transfers require the specification of an XLM memo.
Once sufficient supply of XLM is established on the platform, trading on the XLM/USD, XLM/EUR, and XLM/BTC order books will start in phases, beginning with post-only mode and proceeding to full trading should our metrics for a healthy market be met. Support for XLM will be immediately available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.
Stellar’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumen (XLM), powers the Stellar payment network. Stellar aims to connect banks, payment systems and individuals quickly and reliably. Since its launch in 2014, its vision has been to unite the world’s financial infrastructure so that money can flow quickly and cheaply between banks, businesses, and people. The Internet connected the world’s computers so that information could be shared globally. Stellar aims to do the same for money.
Please note that XLM is not yet available on Coinbase.com or via our consumer mobile apps. We will make a separate announcement if and when this functionality is added.
The Stages of the XLM Launch
There will be four stages to the launch as outlined below. We will follow each of these stages independently for each new order book. 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 send tweets from our Coinbase Pro Twitter account as each order book moves through the following phases:
- Transfer-only. Starting at 1pm PT on March 13, customers will be able to transfer XLM into their Coinbase Pro account. Customers will not yet be able to place orders and no orders will be filled on these order books. Order books will be in transfer-only mode for approximately 12 hours.
- Post-only. In the second stage, customers can post limit orders but there will be no matches (completed orders). Order books will be in post-only mode for a minimum of one minute.
- Limit-only. In the third stage, limit orders will start matching but customers are unable to submit market orders. Order books will be in limit-only mode for a minimum of ten minutes.
- Full trading. In the final stage, full trading services will be available, including limit, market, and stop orders.
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.
You can sign up for a Coinbase Pro account here to start trading. For more information on trading XLM on Coinbase Pro, visit our support page.
Stellar Lumens (XLM) 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.
