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Posted on September 19, 2019Coinbase continues to explore support for new digital assets
We are exploring support for assets that have not launched for our customers around the world.
Coinbase’s goal is to offer support for all assets that meet our technical standards and which comply with applicable laws. Over time we expect our customers around the world will have access through Coinbase platforms to at least 90% of the aggregate market cap of all digital assets in circulation.
To date, we have largely explored support for assets that are already live and available to trade on other venues. Today, we are announcing our intention to explore assets that have not launched and which Coinbase may choose to support in the future.
We will continue to evaluate prospective assets against our Digital Asset Framework to assess factors like security, compliance, and the project’s alignment with our mission of creating an open financial system for the world. To apply for listing, fill out an application here.
Digital Assets Under Review
Today we’re announcing that we are exploring the addition of a range of new assets. As part of the exploratory process customers may see public-facing APIs and other signs that we are conducting engineering work to potentially support these assets.
These new assets include, in alphabetical order: Avalanche, Celo, Chia, Coda, Dfinity, Filecoin, Handshake, Kadena, Mobilecoin, NEAR, Nervos, Oasis, Orchid, Polkadot, Solana, Spacemesh, and Telegram.
Our decision to support any asset requires significant technical and compliance review and may be subject to regulatory approval in some jurisdictions. We therefore cannot guarantee whether or when any above-listed asset will be listed on a Coinbase product in any jurisdiction. As per our listing process, we will add new assets on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, subject to applicable review and authorizations. The omission of assets from this publication does not disqualify any such asset from active review and potential listing.
Our customers can expect Coinbase to make future, similar announcements as we continue to explore the addition of numerous assets across the platform.
Coinbase continues to explore support for new digital assets 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 September 19, 2019Dash (DASH) is now available on Coinbase
Starting today, Coinbase supports Dash (DASH) at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store DASH. DASH will be available for customers in all Coinbase-supported regions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.
Dash (DASH)
Created in 2014, Dash is a cryptocurrency optimized for payments that has optional speed and privacy features. At this time, Coinbase will not support these features. Dash is accepted at over 4,000 merchants worldwide. Its unique network architecture consists of both regular miners and privileged machines called Masternodes. Through its off-chain community governance system, anyone can submit and vote on proposals to improve the ecosystem’s functionality, utility, and adoption.
One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to buy and sell more cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. Last year we announced a new 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 DASH 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, convert, send, receive, or store DASH today.
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.
Dash (DASH) is 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 September 17, 2019Congratulations Capture the Coin participants!
We are pleased to announce the completion of our Blockchain Security competition — Capture the Coin. Our mission was to promote the field of blockchain security and educate players in the areas of cryptography, smart contracts, forensic analysis, malware, and others. We are excited that so many of you participated and hopefully inspired to join the good fight to make the future open financial system safer for all.
Prizes
The prize for all of the top contest participants is a custom laser etched steel wallet. In case you are not familiar, steel wallets can be used to backup the mnemonic seeds used to unlock all of the cryptocurrency wallets such as Coinbase Wallet.
We had eight players who completed all of the challenges. We will be reaching out to each of them with prize information shortly:
1. arpox
2. Gundas
3. Verichains
4. Captura
5. Starkat
6. Kubertu
7. mofa28
8. drdrIn addition, congratulations to the four winners at Defcon 27 — Blockchain Village:
1. philip
2. ConsenSysDilligence
3. Skynet404
4. Lollerk8sReally good job, folks!
Challenges
Our challenges were split into three categories: Trivia, Blockchain, and Cryptography. They covered a wide range of topics ranging from blockchain forensics, smart contract security, cryptocurrency-stealing malware, and various cryptography flaws. We would like to thank the many challenge creators and platform maintainers:
- Capture the Coin Infrastructure — Nishil Shah
- Trivia challenges — Zassmin Montes de Oca and Peter Kacherginsky
- Blockchain: Satoshi’s Secret — Mark Nesbitt
- Blockchain: Hide and Seek — Peter Kacherginsky
- Blockchain: Evil Droid — Joel Kenny
- Blockchain: Daily Double…spend — Don Yu
- Blockchain: Tricky Ether — Peter Kacherginsky
- Cryptography: AES Encryption Flaw — Jake Craige
- Cryptography: ECDSA Nonce Reuse — Jake Craige
- Cryptography: Linkable Payments — Max Mikhaylov
- Cryptography: Schnorrer Signature — Jesse Posner
- Cryptography: Forging a Signature — Jake Craige
Also special thanks to Dom Flask for the awesome prize design and many others at Coinbase who helped make this contest happen!
Statistics
The contest had 438 registered users and 154 active participants both online and during Defcon 27’s Blockchain Village.
Out of the 22 challenges, cryptography category had the least amount of solves and trivia the most. Our hardest cryptography challenge, Linkable Payments, had only 11 solves and our easiest challenge, Satoshi, had 136 solves.
The majority of players with solutions came from the US, followed by Singapore, France, UK, and other countries in Europe.
We hope you enjoyed the contest and looking forward to seeing you all next year for another installment of Capture the Coin. But for now, look out for the upcoming blog series where we will cover challenge solutions and the behind the scenes look on our CTF infrastructure.
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.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Congratulations Capture the Coin participants! 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 September 12, 2019Dash (DASH) is launching on Coinbase Pro
On Monday September 16 at 10am PST, transfer DASH into your Coinbase Pro account ahead of trading. Support for DASH will be available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom. Additional regions may be added at a later date.
On Monday September 16, 2019, we will begin accepting inbound transfers of DASH to Coinbase Pro. We will accept deposits for at least 12 hours prior to enabling full trading. Trading will begin on or after 9AM Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, September 17, if liquidity conditions are met.
Once sufficient supply of DASH is established on the platform, trading on the DASH/USD, and DASH/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 DASH will be immediately available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.
Created in 2014, Dash is a cryptocurrency optimized for payments that has optional speed and privacy features. At this time, Coinbase will not support these features. Dash is accepted at over 4,000 merchants worldwide. Its unique network architecture consists of both regular miners and privileged machines called Masternodes. Through its off-chain community governance system, anyone can submit and vote on proposals to improve the ecosystem’s functionality, utility, and adoption.
Please note that DASH 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 DASH 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 on Monday September 16, customers will be able to transfer DASH 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. We will communicate the exact timing for this phase via Twitter closer to the date.
- 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 DASH on Coinbase Pro, visit our support page.
Dash (DASH) 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.
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Posted on September 10, 2019Announcing the Coinbase USDC Bootstrap Fund
How Coinbase is contributing to the emerging DeFi ecosystem with USDC
In 2018, the Centre Consortium — which includes Coinbase and Circle — launched USDC, a stable, secure, and transparent stablecoin. Since then, it has become one of the world’s most popular and trusted stablecoins.
To encourage further growth in decentralized finance (DeFi), Coinbase is announcing the USDC Bootstrap Fund. The Fund will support developers building DeFi protocols by investing USDC directly in the protocol. Unlike more traditional investments, this money is tied up in a smart contract protocol with return provided by a counterparty (a borrower or taker).
In our talks with countless developers, we consistently heard how hard it was to get liquidity for a new DeFi protocol. With the Bootstrap Fund, we aim to make it easier for developers to launch their protocol and help them to create healthy, liquid marketplaces by leveraging USDC. The USDC Bootstrap Fund is separate from Coinbase Ventures, the venture arm of Coinbase which has made 50+ traditional equity investments in projects across the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Through the investment of USDC, our goal over time is to support DeFi teams in making their products safer, and more reliant and accessible than existing financial products. We view this as just one first step for how Coinbase will support DeFi. In the coming months, we’ll share our learnings and future integrations with the community.
We are also announcing today our first two investments: Compound and dYdX. Coinbase has added 1 MM in USDC to Compound, a money market protocol. We will also add 1 MM in USDC to dYdX, a margin trading protocol and open trading platform for crypto assets. In both cases, the USDC tokens are available to borrow by any counterparty willing to provide crypto collateral and pay a floating interest rate.
We encourage all DeFi developers and smart contract projects that want to integrate USDC to apply for the USDC Bootstrap Fund. To apply, please fill out this form.
Authors: Nemil Dalal (Twitter), Jacob Horne (Twitter), Daniel Que (Twitter)
This website may contain 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.
Announcing the Coinbase USDC Bootstrap Fund 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 August 28, 2019The 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education
Coinbase regularly engages with students and universities across the globe as part of recruiting efforts. In our second annual Coinbase Report on Higher Education, we again partnered with Qriously to ask students directly about their thoughts on crypto and blockchain, and tracked how they’ve changed in the past 12 months.
In this year’s report, we outline findings about rising student interest in crypto, and an increasing number of courses focused on blockchain, cryptocurrencies, or bitcoin that are being taught across a range of disciplines. This interest in studying crypto at colleges and universities speaks volumes about the future of money.
Key Findings
- 56 percent of the world’s top 50 universities now offer at least one course on crypto or blockchain — up from 42 percent in 2018
- Twice as many students report having taken a crypto or blockchain course than they did in 2018
- Nearly 70 percent of crypto and blockchain classes are in departments outside of computer science, including law, the humanities, and economics
- Original Coinbase research includes a Qriously survey of 735 U.S. students age 16 and older, a comprehensive review of courses at 50 international universities, analysis of research citations and non-coursework offerings, and interviews with professors and students.
- Cornell University tops the Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education list
During the 2017 school year, Cornell University undergrad Joseph Ferrera wanted to learn more about cryptocurrency and blockchain, which was dominating the news amid the runup in the price of Bitcoin. Few classes existed at the time, so he and a classmate decided to form a club for interested students called Cornell Blockchain, and they asked Emin Gün Sirer, a Computer Science professor and co-director of Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3), to advise them.
In short order, the club filled a room designed to hold 120 students. “I expected that about 80 to 90 percent of club members would be pretty geeky computer science students,” notes Sirer. “I was so incredibly wrong. I’d say at most 20 to 30 percent are from computer science, and the rest are from all across campus.”
Unlike many other new technologies — and established industries — cryptocurrency and blockchain has quickly shown its potential to reshape multiple academic and professional disciplines: computer science, legal, economics, finance, social science, the list goes on. As students from a wider and wider cross-section of majors express interest in learning about the burgeoning field, some of the world’s best universities are exploring how they can meet surging demand to sate curiosity about the technology and set their graduates up for success.
“The blockchain domain’s interdisciplinary nature makes it very different from any traditional field,” notes University of California Berkeley computer science professor Dawn Song. And so at schools around the world, legal scholars are grappling with ethics and regulatory structures, economists are exploring the potential of borderless currency, computer scientists are building new applications, and social scientists are looking at overall impact on society.
All of which is reflected in the Cornell Blockchain club. “There’s a ton of interest from the business school, the hotel management school, the medical school, even the agriculture school,” says Ferrera, who himself graduated from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration this spring and is working as the business manager of Ava Labs, a startup founded by Cornell’s Sirer working to explore decentralized, blockchain-based payment technology. “We’ve had so many professors reach out to to learn more about blockchain and see how it applies to their field. It’s really cool to be part of a community where there’s so much engagement.”
Cornell’s highly engaged student group is just one of the criteria that landed the university at the top of the Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education list, introduced this year as part of the second annual Coinbase Report on Higher Education. (Read the inaugural Coinbase Report on Higher Education here.)
As part of our second annual study, we broadened our methodology to analyze a more comprehensive set of determining factors. To assess the current landscape of cryptocurrency in higher education, Coinbase reviewed the course catalogs of the Top 50 global universities as ranked by US News and World Report. Our study focused on classes available to undergraduate and graduate-level students in 2019 for which information was available online.
This year, 56 percent of the top global universities now offer at least one course on crypto or blockchain, compared to 42 percent in 2018
Computer science classes still are the most common, accounting for 32.2 percent. But finance, business, and economics classes collectively tally 19.8 percent, and law-school classes add another 10.7 percent.
However, classes only tell part of the story of a university’s commitment to the field, so this year we also ran an analysis of non-coursework offerings like official research initiatives and student-run crypto clubs, and we also tracked research citations involving blockchain out of all 50 schools, leveraging data from Google Scholar attributions. Applying a weighting to these supporting factors (methodology detailed below) brought us to the list of Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education.
Uniting the top 10 schools on the list — which in the U.S. include MIT, New York University, Stanford, and the University of California-Berkeley — is a deep commitment to crypto and blockchain at both the student and faculty level. Cornell offers 14 classes on cryptocurrency and/or blockchain (up from 9 in 2018) and its IC3 group brings together researchers from top universities around the world.
Last year, Stanford held the mantle of teaching the largest number of courses on crypto and blockchain (10), followed by Cornell (9) and University of Pennsylvania (6). In 2019, Stanford is offering 8 courses and University of Pennsylvania is offering 2.
Joining the U.S. institutions in the Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education list are four international schools, including École Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne in Switzerland and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Students increasingly see fragmentation across the financial system as a global problem that needs to be solved, notes Cornell’s Sirer: “For this generation, the idea that you can’t easily send dollars around the world online is a really bizarre limitation.”
Among students, distrust in the current financial system is feeding an increasing curiosity around crypto, and it cuts across disciplines. Two-thirds of students describe the current financial system as “unstable,” “inefficient,” “unequal,” or “slow-moving,” according to a survey of 735 U.S. students age 16 and older commissioned by Coinbase and conducted by Qriously.
34 percent of students surveyed expressed interest in taking a course on crypto or blockchain, compared to just 28 percent in 2018. And twice as many (18 percent) report having taken a class on the topic, compared to the number reported from 2018.
“Definitely, some of the students interested in this topic are ones who feel mistrustful of the current banking system,” says computer science professor Cesare Fracassi, who leads the Blockchain Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business (number 13 on the Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education list). “So they want to create an alternative system where the decision-making process isn’t centralized. Those are the more idealistic ones. Others are maybe a little more pragmatic, and interested in ways this technology can be used to improve companies’ performance and efficiency.”
Sure enough, Coinbase research shows that students are increasingly interested in learning how blockchain and crypto can benefit people all over the world. Interest in learning about blockchain and “social justice” rose from 13 percent to 20 percent between 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, student interest in learning about “security” and “future applications and growth” both declined in the past year, from 37 percent to 29 percent and from 31 percent to 27 percent.
For the last few years, the University of California-Berkeley has been offering a popular class called “Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics, and the Future of Technology, Business and Law.” The university is offering the class as a collaboration by three separate departments: the schools of engineering, business, and law. “On the technical side, expertise is required in things like distributed systems and software security and, of course, cryptography,” says Berkeley’s Song. “But since it’s very new technology, there are also lots of open questions about regulatory aspects. And there’s also the potential for it to lead to new business models.”
At the National University of Singapore, business students taking “Financial Regulation in a Digital Age” can learn about how technology developments including blockchain are transforming finance — and regulatory issues that need to be addressed to fully leverage the potential.
Stanford Law students taking “Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies: Law, Economics, Business, and Policy” study legal and regulatory structures “with a particular emphasis on securities regulation.” Sociology undergrads at Stanford are exploring the potential for blockchain to create a fairer economic system in a class called “Justice + Poverty Innovation.” Students learn about “how to use emerging technologies like AI and blockchain” as solutions for people navigating housing, medical, and debt.
“Entrepreneurship without Borders,” a course at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, guides students through new global venture creation, with a special focus on blockchain technology. And this fall, MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), part of the Media Lab, is offering a Blockchain Ethics class that will bring together a wide variety of scholars, including ones from Harvard Law School.
Oceane Boulais is an MIT masters candidate who will be the teaching assistant in the Blockchain Ethics class this fall. She studied engineering as an undergrad at Florida Atlantic University, and became passionate about crypto during a summer boot camp hosted by the DCI. She compares the emerging blockchain technology to the early years of the internet. “The internet is this beautiful thing, but it’s complicated,” says Boulais. “Hindsight is 2020, so it’s really important that we start thinking about the future now.”
As digital currency and the systems that surround it are still being built, Boulais believes this is a unique moment to build the next wave of our digital future with intention. “DCI is a place where we really care about imagining what the world will be like if a distributed ledger underpins the Internet of the Future. Like who sets these things up? Who is responsible? It’s a lot of reckoning with this idea of responsibility. I think that’s really cool.”
You don’t have to be enrolled as a full-time student in an elite university to learn about crypto. MIT’s Sloan School of Management offers a six-week online course for professionals, and UC Berkeley offers a similar online class called Blockchain Fundamentals via the online learning hub edX (which also hosts classes on the topic created by the LINUX Foundation). Other sites, including Udemy, Coursera, and Udacity offer an array of courses, including Udacity’s “Become a Blockchain Developer” nanodegree program, taught by experts working in the field, and Coursera’s “Fintech Specialization” course, created and taught by faculty from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
Whether we’re talking about computer science grads seeking to build a new blockchain-based internet or business school alums looking to understand cutting-edge supply-chain technologies, one thing unites this population: passion for making an impact in an exciting new field after they leave campus.
“There’s a lot of power for students to enter this industry and help take control of it,” notes Cornell Blockchain club co-founder and recent graduate Ferrera. “If you go to a big bank or a well-established consulting firm, you kind of know what you’re going to get. With crypto you get to shape the field and become a leader.”
To learn about open positions at Coinbase, visit www.coinbase.com/careers.
A note on methodology
Starting with the world’s top 50 universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report: Best Global Universities 2019, Coinbase counted the number of distinct classes offered during 2019 that include sections on blockchain, bitcoin, or cryptocurrency, according to each school’s public catalog (+1 for each distinct course). In addition, we factored in three other criteria: the frequency of each institution’s cryptocurrency and blockchain research citations (maximum of +5, with the remainder weighted proportionally) and whether or not a school hosts an official crypto/blockchain research institute (+3) and/or student club (+1). We combined those three criteria to produce the “Coinbase 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education” list. To assess student sentiments about crypto, Coinbase commissioned Qriously to conduct a study of 735 U.S. students age 16 and older. The general population survey included 6,011 respondents 16 and older.
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.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase.
The 2019 Leaders in Crypto Education 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 August 22, 2019Use dapps on any desktop browser with Coinbase Wallet’s WalletLink
Starting today, Coinbase Wallet users can use their favorite decentralized apps (dapps) on any desktop browser with Coinbase Wallet’s WalletLink.
WalletLink acts as a secure bridge between your Coinbase Wallet app and your desktop browser. To get started, all you have to do is scan a WalletLink QR code with your Wallet app. You can then use dapps anywhere, while keeping your funds safe and secure on your mobile Wallet app.
Taking the dapp out of the dapp browser
Since we launched Coinbase Wallet, hundreds of thousands of users have explored the new decentralized web through Wallet’s mobile dapp browser. People tell us they love the best-in-class Coinbase Wallet experience–biometric authentication to keep funds secure; encrypted key backups; support for a variety of coins and collectibles; access to the latest dapps–all wrapped up in a beautiful user experience.
But to date, the Coinbase Wallet experience has been limited to mobile devices. Users on desktop web browsers have had to resort to installing clunky browser extensions, copying and pasting private keys across devices, and seeing fragmented wallet balances. Now, WalletLink enables a simpler way to use dapps.
To try WalletLink, make sure you’ve updated to the latest version of Coinbase Wallet (version 19.1 on iOS and 18.0 on Android). Now visit any of the dapps that have integrated with WalletLink (listed below, with more on the way) and click the option to connect your Coinbase Wallet. Next, scan the QR code with your Coinbase Wallet QR scanner. This creates a secure encrypted link between the Wallet app and your browser. Finally, approve access to the DApp and you’re all set! Now, whenever you submit a transaction, you’ll get a ping on your phone for you to approve the transaction.
WalletLink also supports persistent connections to multiple dapps, so you don’t have to scan a QR code each time you want to use a new dapp.
WalletLink has been tested with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera browsers. We plan to roll out support for native mobile apps and more currencies in the future.
Top dapps support WalletLink, with more coming soon
As part of today’s announcement, some of the most popular crypto dapps in the ecosystem are launching support for WalletLink, including:
- Compound — On-chain borrowing and lending platform
- dYdX — Margin trading, borrowing, and lending
- IDEX — Decentralized exchange
- Maker — Stablecoin and decentralized reserve bank
WalletLink support is also coming soon to Uniswap and more of the most popular dapps.
If you want to know if your favorite DApp supports WalletLink, look for the option to connect your Coinbase Wallet. If you are a DApp developer, WalletLink takes just 5 minutes to integrate and does not require you to deploy any additional infrastructure.
Open-sourcing WalletLink
We see WalletLink as a critical way to expand access to dapps, which is why we want this experience to be available to everyone in the crypto community. To make that possible, we’re open sourcing WalletLink today and making it available for any dapp developer and any wallet that wants to integrate it into their product.
Look out for a blog post on the technical side of WalletLink, explaining how it works and why we decided to open source it.
About 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). Coinbase Wallet also offers a DApp browser. 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. Please reach out with feedback or if you ever need some troubleshooting.
This website may contain 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.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase and are for illustration purposes only. Actual product may vary, including the dapps available and integrated with Coinbase Wallet.
Use dapps on any desktop browser with Coinbase Wallet’s WalletLink 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 August 19, 2019Coinbase at Violet Hacks
Recently, Coinbase had the honor of partnering with The Violet Society, an organization whose mission is to build community and career mentorship for women and gender-nonbinary professionals in the tech industry, by sponsoring Violet Hacks, a hackathon where a group of about 200 of these professionals gathered to design, build, and pitch various products to a panel of judges in a friendly competition.
Members of the Coinbase Engineering and Talent teams at Violet Hacks in San Francisco. Over the course of the event, we witnessed many amazing and talented engineers, designers, and product managers hack on a wide range of projects including an AI skincare product recommendation system, a GitHub productivity suite, a customized makeup tutorial app, and even a pet adoption matching app. It was incredible to see how much ground these teams covered in less than 24 hours.
Violet Hacks kicked off with an opening keynote address from Katia Ameri, founder of Mirra, and went on to provide a full slate of informational sessions, panels, and workshops for hackathon participants to attend throughout the weekend. They could take a quick break from hacking in order to learn about UX design from Laurel Beyers, a principal product designer at Nyansa, product management from Ana Pischl, a lead product manager at Zeus, or even attend an “Intro to Blockchain” workshop facilitated by Gloria Kimbwala, founder of Shule. Throughout the weekend, we had great conversations with attendees about Coinbase, who we are and what we do, and about the challenges that we face as women in engineering, in tech, and in this current financial system.
Coinbase is proud to support endeavors like this that empower and support underrepresented minorities in the tech industry and are a critical step towards breaking down the barriers and stereotypes that still inhibit fair representation.
At some point in your career, you will probably find yourself interacting and working with people who do not share life experiences and world views similar to your own. At these times, it's important to work on expressing your thoughts and ideas clearly to them and, most importantly, listening to them and understanding where they are coming from. Building a team that is welcoming to those of all different perspectives, ideas, and backgrounds is in large part about fostering a culture where we focus on self-awareness and empathy as muscles to grow.
At Coinbase, our mission is to leverage cryptocurrencies to build an open financial system which promotes economic freedom and financial inclusion. In this system, access to financial services should be equal, easy, effective, and secure. This is a future wherein the availability and opportunity for access to financial services transcend socioeconomic, educational, geopolitical, cultural, racial, and gender divides.
For this reason, the topic of inclusion is top of mind at Coinbase as we strive to define the role we play in influencing the cryptoeconomy. We recognize the need to build out a team that can help represent the myriad perspectives of the populations we are aiming to serve.
In our recently published Culture Doc, our CEO Brian Armstrong outlined six tenets of our culture, one of which is to “Focus on the Customer.” Building a more heterogeneous team enables us to be more sensitive and empathetic towards all of our customers’ needs and concerns as we continue to scale. With intention and deliberation, we can focus our efforts on building products that will speak to customers with a multitude of backgrounds, life stories, and experiences all across the globe.
If you’re curious about crypto, finance, technology, or security, and would like to work with some of the amazing engineers here at Coinbase on some of the ambitions outlined here, get in touch with us!
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.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Coinbase at Violet Hacks 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 August 16, 2019Post Mortem: A closer look at a password storage issue affecting 3,420 customers
We recently began emailing 3,420 Coinbase customers to let them know that a bug on our signup page resulted in some registration details being stored in clear text in our internal web server logs. While we are confident that we’ve fixed the root cause and that the logged information was not improperly accessed, misused, or compromised, we are requiring those customers to change their passwords as a best-practice precaution.
Here’s what happened
Under a very specific and rare error condition, the registration form on our signup page wouldn’t load correctly, which meant that any attempt to create a new Coinbase account under those conditions would fail. Unfortunately, it also meant that the individual’s name, email address, and proposed password (and state of residence, if in the US) would be sent to our internal logs.
If the individual reloaded the page and then submitted the form for a successful registration, their registration information would (correctly) not be logged, and the password would be securely hashed. However, in the 3,420 instances referenced above, the user successfully registered using a password with a hash that matched the one previously logged.
Here’s how we responded
After we identified and fixed the bug, we traced back all the places where these logs might have ended up. We have an internal logging system hosted in AWS, as well as a small number of log analysis service providers. Access to all of these systems is tightly restricted and audited. A thorough review of access to these logging systems did not reveal any unauthorized access to this data. Additionally, we triggered a password reset for impacted customers, even though a password alone is not sufficient to access a Coinbase account — our device verification emails and mandatory 2FA mechanisms would both have been triggered and blocked any unauthorized login attempts.
The technical details
The Coinbase front-end web app is built using the React.js framework and leverages React’s Server Side Rendering (SSR) for key pages (including /signup). SSR means that, instead of sending a barebones HTML page and depending on React to fully populate it in the browser, we send a partly rendered page from the server and let React put the finishing touches on in the browser. We use SSR in order to give searchable content to search engine crawlers, which generally don’t run Javascript. Any user attempting to register needs to have JavaScript enabled, and needs to have that JavaScript load correctly. In virtually all circumstances, both of these things are true, and React handles form validation and submission to the server. However, if a user had JavaScript disabled or their browser received a React.js error when loading, there was enough pre-rendered HTML that a user could fill out and attempt to submit our registration form.
The HTML form itself was extremely basic, since we expected that the details would be filled in by React: <form>[list of fields]</form>. This had two implications for default behavior:
- Because no “action” attribute was set, the official behavior defined in the W3C specification was “undefined”. In practice, however, some browsers will set “action” to the current URI and make a best effort to submit the form.
- Because the “method” was not set, per W3C specification the browser defaulted to GET, which meant that, all form variables were URL encoded and appended as a query string to submit data to the server, e.g in the pattern /signup?first_name=Alice&last_name=Smith&email=alice%40example.com&password=password
This query string then ended up in our logs. The fix itself was simple and straightforward: we changed the default form method to POST, as data submitted in the request body (instead of a query string) is not logged: <form method=”POST”>[list of fields]</form>. We also searched the rest of our repository for any other forms with that problematic behavior, and did not identify any. We’re also in the process of implementing additional mechanisms to detect and prevent the inadvertent introduction of this sort of bug in the future.
Conclusion
We maintain incredibly high standards for securing the Coinbase platform, and any time we fall even slightly short of those standards, we mobilize a team to figure out what went wrong, and how we prevent it from happening again. We also believe in being transparent with our customers, which is why we’re sharing the results of our investigation today.
As a reminder, Coinbase also maintains an active bug bounty program on HackerOne, which has paid out over a quarter of a million dollars to date: https://hackerone.com/coinbase. While this particular bug was discovered internally, we welcome security researchers to submit reports any time they believe they may have uncovered a flaw in one of our systems.
Post Mortem: A closer look at a password storage issue affecting 3,420 customers 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 August 15, 2019Coinbase Custody acquires Xapo’s institutional business, becoming the world’s largest crypto…
Coinbase Custody acquires Xapo’s institutional business, becoming the world’s largest crypto custodian
Crossing $7 billion in assets under custody, Coinbase Custody is now the most popular and trusted choice for institutions to store cryptocurrency.
Today, we are announcing that Coinbase Custody has completed an acquisition of Xapo’s institutional businesses. This acquisition caps off a tremendous period of growth and innovation for Coinbase Custody. In just over one year since launch, Coinbase Custody has grown to over $7 billion in Assets Under Custody (AUC) stored on behalf of more than 120 clients in 14 different countries, making it the largest, most globally recognized and most trusted institutional custodian in the world. From the start, our goal has been to build the trusted foundation for institutional investment in Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto assets in general. We’re thrilled to help enable some of the tremendous demand for this emerging asset class.
Xapo has long been a pioneer in the storage of crypto assets, leading the industry in the creation of security techniques that have kept their customers’ cryptocurrency safe since 2014. Xapo was founded with the mission of making Bitcoin more secure and accessible. Coinbase will extend Xapo’s legacy and bring it yet another step closer to achieving its mission.
Since 2012, Coinbase has served as the world’s onramp to Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. Through our consumer products, Coinbase has helped more people experience their first crypto transactions than any other company. Like Xapo, we share the goal of making Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies accessible in a way that’s secure, safe and compliant with local laws. Through the acquisition of Xapo’s institutional businesses, we’re now proud to act not only as the gateway for millions of people to cryptocurrency, but also as the world’s largest and most trusted steward of digital assets. Xapo has been a tremendous flagbearer for Bitcoin and the economic equality it can offer to billions across the globe. We’re honored to carry this flag onward.
Looking forward, our focus will stay on our clients. We work every day to provide them true peace-of-mind in knowing that their assets are safe and accessible. In addition to custody, we’re excited to explore new ways to monetize and leverage crypto assets such as staking, borrowing against crypto portfolios and lending crypto to trusted counterparties.
Coinbase is committed to serving a wide spectrum of institutional clients including hedge funds, family offices, endowments and proprietary trading desks as they decide to onboard crypto. Our institutional range of products provides a seamless, powerful and compliant ecosystem for our clients to trade, store and interact with their crypto. The suite combines access to the world’s largest pool of regulated, verified crypto liquidity through Coinbase Pro with high performance APIs and a high-touch coverage team. Paired with access to our global OTC trading desk and Coinbase Custody’s highly secure and insured storage platform, Coinbase delivers the trust, security, and performance needed by investors to trade with confidence.
It’s with huge pride that we welcome Xapo’s Institutional customers to Coinbase. Their legacy, knowledge and experience will help to make our mission of creating an open financial system for the world a reality.
About Xapo: Xapo is a New York DFS-regulated entity (NY Bitlicense holder) and a Gibraltar-licensed E-money institution, that offers a multi-currency digital wallet and card that operates in the global market. Their mission is to give users from all over the world the ability to send, receive, spend and store their money, globally and safely. Their team value proposition ‘Impact Globally, Work Remotely’ is represented by a workforce of over 250 team members, who are globally distributed across more than 50 countries.
This website may contain 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.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Coinbase Custody acquires Xapo’s institutional business, becoming the world’s largest crypto… was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
