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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.
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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 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 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 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.
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Posted on March 13, 2019Coinbase Custody + Agency OTC: instant liquidity on offline funds
- Easy and quick trading for offline funds
- Agency-only OTC desk provides anonymous access to trusted counterparties who have cleared our AML/ KYC policies
- Our OTC and Custody client service teams provide a high-touch, seamless process from pricing risk through trade settlement
- Last week, Coinbase Custody completed its first OTC trade directly out of cold storage. This is a major unlock for our clients: easy and immediate liquidity on their offline funds.
The Coinbase Custody dashboard Coinbase Custody + Coinbase OTC
Coinbase Custody is now directly integrated with Coinbase’s OTC desk. Custody clients can leverage the OTC desk to price and confirm trades before moving funds. Additionally, we’ve honed this process to make it as simple and smooth as possible — our OTC and Custody client service teams work together to provide a single point of contact throughout the entire process. For clients initiating positions, the process is even simpler: they can buy OTC and settle assets directly into Custody.Agency OTC
Coinbase’s OTC desk is agency-only, and all counterparties must clear our robust KYC and AML policies. As agents acting on our clients’ behalf, we work hard to secure for them the best price in the market. Finally, by standing in the middle of the trades, we preserve anonymity for both counterparties and guarantee settlement.Vertically Integrated Custody
Our clients were loud and clear that they needed access to instant and anonymous liquidity. We’re pleased to take this first step towards a more vertically-integrated custody service and look forward to adding more features that will make the trading experience as seamless as possible for our clients.For more information on OTC trading via Coinbase, contact: tradingdesk@coinbase.com
Coinbase Custody + Agency OTC: instant liquidity on offline funds 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 12, 2019Easily transfer crypto from Coinbase.com to your Coinbase Wallet
We’re excited to announce that you can now link your Coinbase.com account to your Coinbase Wallet app. Once your Coinbase account is linked, you can easily transfer crypto to your Wallet app with just a couple of clicks, anytime you need it.
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.
Whether you use Coinbase Wallet to store your own crypto or to use decentralized apps (i.e., “ DApps”), managing your funds across Coinbase products just got a lot easier.
Your Coinbase Wallet app will update in the next few days, after which you will receive an in-app notification to activate this optional new feature.
To connect your Coinbase.com account, click Connect Now in the notification, or select ‘Connect to Coinbase’ from the Settings menu at any time.
Once your account is linked, you can transfer funds at any time from the Settings menu.
You can also unlink your account at any time through the Settings menu.
For Coinbase users that frequently transfer money between their Coinbase.com account and a software or hardware wallet, we believe this new feature will give them the ‘easiest to use’ experience that is a hallmark of all Coinbase products.
One of the major roadblocks to the user experience of DApps, has been funding your wallet in order to buy digital collectibles, play games, or use open finance apps such as Compound or Maker. Now, with this feature, funding your Coinbase Wallet from your Coinbase.com account is just one click away. This gives all Coinbase customers an easy onramp to access the exciting world of DApps.
In the future, we’ll also make it easy for you to send crypto back to your Coinbase.com account from your Coinbase Wallet, to trade or exchange back into fiat, and to buy crypto if your Coinbase Wallet balance is running low.
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.
Easily transfer crypto from Coinbase.com to your 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 8, 2019Coinbase Reports: Women & Crypto
One-third of college-educated women recently surveyed by Coinbase do not believe they have equal access to the financial system in their own countries; millennial women believe crypto can close the financial gender gap
At Coinbase, our mission — to create an open financial system for the world — is driven by a set of beliefs about what that system will enable, including more innovation, equality of opportunity, and economic freedom. Because of this mission, we are always seeking signals of these advancements. In time for International Women’s Day, we partnered with Qriously to ask women directly about their thoughts on money, the role of technology in the world, and the current financial system.
We also asked some of the brightest minds in crypto (who happen to be women) what compels them to build, invest in, and advocate for the space. In this report, we share insights on current attitudes about finance and crypto among women in the US and the UK and identify the ways in which crypto is uniquely poised to bring about more financial equality in the world.
In our study (methodology below), we found a number of interesting themes. There is a predominant sense that technology will have a positive impact on the financial system in the next 10 years, an indication that fintech as an industry is viewed as having real momentum. At the same time, there are meaningful differences between men and women in the US and in the UK when it comes to how much access they believe they currently have to the financial system as well as how much control they have over their financial future. Further, there are also different perceptions around how important financial independence is between the genders.
Building upon these findings, we were curious to learn where crypto fits into this story — what we found is that young women are compelled by the connection between their own financial independence and the potential role crypto could play. We found that college-educated women become increasingly interested in learning more about crypto when they understand how the technology might have an impact on leveling the playing field with financial inclusion. Given how this demographic is known to be mission-driven, it’s clear that the positioning and branding of this new technology matters to young women.
Here are detailed results from our study. We surveyed 6,036 people ages 18+ in the US and UK, and broke down the data by age, gender, income, and level of education:
- 82 percent of women surveyed across all age ranges and education levels in the US and the UK — compared to 65 percent of men — think financial independence for women is very important
- Nearly one-third of college-educated women we surveyed do not believe they have equal access to the financial system in their own country
- Most respondents of the general population believe that ‘Yes’ technology will impact finance in the next 10 years. More college educated women (93 percent in our survey) believe this to be the case than the general population.
- 3 in 5 college educated women that we surveyed believe technology’s impact on finance will be positive.
- As more women in the US and UK learn about crypto, they are increasingly interested in the technology; 39 percent of millennial women surveyed say they would be more interested in cryptocurrency if they knew it could make finance more accessible.
It’s no secret that the current financial system leaves many people behind. In many parts of the world, access, gender bias, and restrictive laws and regulations all put additional barriers on women’s ability to open a bank account, get a loan, own land, or start their own businesses.
In a recent report from Edelman, Millennials with Money, 77 percent of affluent millennials in the US believe that the current financial system is designed to favor the rich and powerful at the expense of “ordinary people.” That belief system only grows when you look at global data. According to the World Bank’s 2017 Global Findex Database — the most recent edition of the report, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — only 65 percent of women globally have a bank account compared to 72 percent of men.
In 40 percent of the countries assessed as part of the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Gender Gap report (an annual benchmark of gender-based disparities across 149 countries), women do not have the same access to financial services as men. The Economic Participation and Opportunity gap — which specifically looks at participation in the workforce, payment for work, and advancement opportunities — is 41.9 percent: “Gaps in control of financial assets and in time spent on unpaid tasks continue to preserve economic disparities between men and women.”
This isn’t expected to change quickly with the current financial system. The World Economic Forum estimates that based on overall trends and underlying economic factors, it will take 202 years to close the economic gender gap. This is reinforced by Coinbase research conducted with Qriously revealing that half of millennial women believe the pace at which women are gaining equal access to finance is happening more slowly than they’d expect.
Coinbase research also found that financial gender inequity is not only an issue in the developing world. Coinbase uncovered that 31 percent of college-educated women in the US and the UK do not believe they have equal access to the financial system in their own countries. That data is supported by the WEF’s most recent Global Gender Gap Index; the US ranks 19 and UK ranks 52 out of 149 countries for Economic Participation and Opportunity.
The connection between finance and freedom
So why is this such a big deal? “Freedom,” says Laura Shin, a journalist who covers the crypto space, and the publisher of the Unchained and Unconfirmed podcasts. “Frankly, that’s what’s at stake when it comes to accessing your own finances.”
Without the ability to open a bank account and transact with the financial system, it’s practically impossible to start a business, become an entrepreneur, and make your own money, notes Soona Amhaz, co-founder of Token Daily, a cryptocurrency and blockchain platform and newsletter that helps people understand the cryptocurrency space. “Let’s say you have a dream of getting something started. You need to open up an account. You need a way to process revenue. And, if you aren’t able to actually get that approval, you aren’t going to be able to do it.”
“Unequal access to financial resources mean unequal access to opportunities,” agrees Olivia Wang, the US head of ZhenFund, China’s largest early-stage fund, founded in partnership with Sequoia China. “We’re in a new era where money flows so fluidly, money is exchanged for information, for education, for entertainment, for expression so quickly and so seamlessly that it becomes more and more imperative that people are able to access financial resources. Financial empowerment is an important part of the blockchain community, the crypto community.”
How crypto allows for equal access to finance
Technology, including crypto, lowers barriers to entry giving anyone with a smartphone the ability to access financial services. “With crypto, you don’t need to ask for approval from a third party,” explains Token Daily’s Amhaz. “You don’t need a passport. It’s not geographically bound. All you need is an internet connection. And you can spin up a wallet, or have your own address, and someone can send money from their internet account to your internet account.”
And in countries where bank account access is limited to men, whether legally or culturally, access to technology can make or break women’s abilities to control their own lives and opportunities. The World Bank has reported evidence that mobile money accounts may already be helping to close the gender gap: “In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, men are twice as likely as women to have a financial institution account — yet women are just as likely as men to have a mobile money account only.”
As Laura Shin notes, “For most of us in the developed world, the barriers to us and our money are pretty frictionless. We can access our funds anytime with credit cards or ATMs or simply going onto an app or website and making a simple payment. Yet there are some more traditional societies where women are not allowed to earn money or are not allowed to have bank accounts or there’s a social taboo against them having bank accounts.”
Ire Aderinokun, co-founder of BuyCoins, a crypto exchange based in Lagos, Nigeria, notes how even in places where women are legally allowed to have a bank account, cultural norms hold women back from controlling their own money. “Cryptocurrency can be really powerful for women, especially in countries like Nigeria, because it allows them to have their financial independence. It’s typically expected here that the man be the person controlling the finances in the home. Even in cases where a woman actually has a job, she’s typically expected to hand over her earnings to her husband, who can then decide how the money will be spent. This can create a really bad power imbalance between the husband and the wife.”
Financial inclusion in the United States
Financial inequality is not only a phenomenon in developing countries. FreeFrom is a US-based organization that works to create financial security for survivors of domestic violence. “One in four women in the U.S. will experience severe domestic violence in their lifetime,” notes FreeFrom founder and CEO Sonya Passi. “In 98 percent of domestic violence cases, in addition to there being physical abuse and emotional abuse, there’s also financial abuse. Survivors of domestic violence typically have every single known aspect of their lives monitored.”
GiveCrypto.org recently granted $25,000 worth of crypto to women who had not yet been able to leave abusive situations for financial reasons. “Cryptocurrency offers survivors the opportunity to keep their money private until they’re ready to use it. For someone who is experiencing abuse at home, here in the U.S., who doesn’t have a bank account, who maybe doesn’t have a job — or access to cash — cryptocurrency can be a lifeline that is the difference between life and death,” Passi added.
How financial inclusion benefits all
While the current financial system may be moving more slowly than women would like, Coinbase research points to general optimism around technology and its role in shaping the future of finance; 93 percent of college-educated women believe tech will impact finance in the next 10 years. And 39 percent of millennial women say their interest in crypto would be greater if they knew it could make finance more accessible to all genders.
Research shows that changes brought about by financial inclusion benefit everyone by boosting the general output of the global economy. A recent report by BNY Mellon and the UN Foundation, Powering Potential, found that achieving equality in women’s access to financial products and services could unlock $330 billion in global annual revenue. “Countries that place additional restrictions on the economic rights of women forgo the benefits that would be gained by allowing women to choose for themselves whether, and how, they would like to participate in the formal economy,” notes the 2017 edition of Cato Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report. “Financial independence and economic empowerment is key to greater gender equality.”
As Amhaz notes, “If you are only tapping into half of your population’s talent, ideas, and productivity, you’re only going to go so far. And empowering that other half and really tapping into that pool of creators and makers and shakers is going to just take us forward. That will be the competitive advantage for countries that want to continue in our globalized economy.”
Olivia Wang encourages all of the women in her life to educate themselves about crypto technology and what it enables. “We live in a world where business transactions happen all the time, and blockchain and crypto will facilitate kind of the next wave of commerce. Having a group that are mothers, leaders, sisters, wives — it’s half the world. I tell people that the most important thing is to educate yourself, to think independently, to read, to speak to people, and to develop your worldview. Through that worldview, I hope that women and the whole global community can come closer to the understanding that Bitcoin could be a great instrument to further this vision.”
Methodology: To assess women’s sentiments about inclusion and the financial system, Coinbase commissioned a study conducted by Qriously of 6,036 people ages 18+ in the US and UK between January 18–21st 2019. The survey asked questions about their thoughts on money, technology, and the financial system.
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.
Coinbase Reports: Women & Crypto 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 7, 2019gRPC to AWS Lambda: Is it Possible?
At Coinbase, we have been evaluating gRPC for new services and have had a positive experience so far. We’ve also been closely watching the trends of the industry towards “Serverless” architectures. We’ve been experimenting with the AWS Lambda platform as a location to run various types of workloads, including API endpoints. However, we are curious if there’s a way to unify these.
There are two main ways to invoke a Lambda function synchronously: API Gateway or a direct “invoke” API call to AWS. API Gateway allows for incoming requests to be made over HTTP/2 with HTTP/1 requests bundled and forwarded to Lambda. Direct invocation of Lambdas requires tight coupling with AWS SDKs.
I was curious about whether it was even possible to make a gRPC call through API gateway to a Lambda and have a response return all the way to the client. Turns out, it’s very close to possible for unary request / response gRPC calls.
Prior to diving in here, it can be helpful to read gRPC On HTTP/2: Engineering A Robust, High Performance Protocol to gain a deeper understanding of gRPC itself.
Bootstrapping
To get started, I followed the AWS SAM quick start guide to get Hello World Lambda deployed.
Then I started bootstrapping a very simple gRPC service with a single RPC that accepted and sent a very simple message.
To build the proto into compiled Golang, I installed the protoc compiler for Golang and compiled the hello protobuf file into a Golang package.
I created a very simple gRPC Golang client for the RPC API.
First Attempt: Send out a gRPC Request
The first error that comes up is related to the content-type of the response.
err making request: rpc error: code = Internal desc = transport: received the unexpected content-type “application/json”
This makes sense as the default lambda is sending back JSON to the gRPC client, which won’t work because of a mismatch. gRPC clients expect “application/grpc+proto” back. The first fix involves setting the correct content-type in the API response from Lambda. This can be done in the Headers field of the APIGatewayProxyResponse struct as below.
Second Attempt: Protobuf Response
After returning the correct content type, the next error is absolutely bizarre.
err making request: rpc error: code = ResourceExhausted desc = grpc: received message larger than max (1701604463 vs. 4194304)
gRPC has a max-size of 16 MB returned in a response, and our function was clearly not returning that much data. However, we are simply returning a string, so it seems now is the time to return a protobuf.
The next handler looks like this:
First, we construct a protobuf struct, then serialize to a byte array, then base64 encode into the final response body. Base64 encoding is required in order for API Gateway to return a binary response.
There’s also two incantations required to actually get API gateway to convert the response to binary. First, we need to set the integration response type to “CONVERT_TO_BINARY”.
This can be done in the CLI below:
aws apigateway update-integration-response \
-rest-api-id XXX \
-resource-id YYY \
-http-method GET \
-status-code 200 \
-patch-operations ‘[{“op” : “replace”, “path” : “/contentHandling”, “value” : “CONVERT_TO_BINARY”}]’In addition, the “Binary Media Types” setting needs to be set to “*/*”
Note: AWS Console Screenshot
Third Attempt: Length-prefixed Response
However, we still get the same ResourceExhausted error. Let’s double check that API Gateway is properly sending back a binary protobuf response.
To debug more, we can set:
export GODEBUG=http2debug=2
This will give us output about what is going back and forth over the wire for the HTTP/2 requests.
We see that as our request goes up, it writes a DATA frame with the content “\x00\x00\x00\x00\a\n\x05Hello”. However, what we get back is “\n\rHello, world.”. What are all those \x00 values in the request? This turns out to be a special serialization format that gRPC uses called “Length Prefixed Messages”. On the wire, this looks like:
See the gRPC HTTP/2 protocol mapping for more detail.
Here’s a quick and dirty implementation of the prefix construction with an updated handler.
Final Attempt: Missing trailing headers
After returning the correct prefix, we run into the final error.
err making request: rpc error: code = Internal desc = server closed the stream without sending trailers
This error is saying that API gateway closed the stream without returning trailing headers. Turns out that gRPC clients make a fundamental assumption that the response contains trailing headers with the stream closed. For example, here is what a proper response looks like:
HEADERS (flags = END_HEADERS)
:status = 200
grpc-encoding = gzip
content-type = application/grpc+protoDATA
<Length-Prefixed Message>HEADERS (flags = END_STREAM, END_HEADERS)
grpc-status = 0 # OKThis is helpful for streaming, but may not be needed for unary request / response RPC invocations. In fact, there is an entire effort within the gRPC community to build compatibility with HTTP/1.1 or browsers with gRPC-Web.
Next Steps
To recap, our goal through this exercise was to see how closely we could get to a Lambda successfully responding to a gRPC client’s request, without modifying the client. We were able to make it almost all the way, but ran into a fundamental assumption that gRPC clients make about trailing headers.
There’s two possible paths forward. Either API Gateway needs to respond with the proper trailing HEADERS frame or gRPC clients need to relax their constraints around expecting trailing headers for unary request / response calls.
However, is it actually worth communicating with Lambdas over gRPC? Maybe. For us, there would be value to standardizing API interactions with Lambdas and containerized environments. The typed interface of Protobuf behind gRPC ensures a strong contract between the client and server that would be difficult to enforce otherwise
Unfortunately, gRPC behind lambda would not support any of the server, client, or bidi streaming solutions that benefit gRPC in a highly stateful environment.
There are other interesting solutions in the community to this problem, such as Twirp (by Twitch) and gRPC-Web.
If you’re interested in helping us build a modern, scalable platform for the future of crypto markets, we’re hiring in San Francisco and Chicago!
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.
gRPC to AWS Lambda: Is it Possible? 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 4, 2019Living up to our values and the Neutrino acquisition
We recently announced the acquisition of Neutrino, a blockchain analytics company. I’d like to share a bit of the back story on this acquisition, and a decision we’ve made going forward.
Our mission as a company is to create an open financial system for the world. To do this, the first step is to empower as many people as possible to get access to cryptocurrency. Since most of the money in the world is tied up in the traditional financial system, this means we need to connect to that system, and be compliant with all laws and regulations as a financial service business. Any cryptocurrency exchange that touches the banking system must implement a know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) program, and a key part of those programs is blockchain analytics.
Until recently, we worked with several outside vendors that provide blockchain analytics, as most exchanges do. However, they didn’t support all the assets we wanted to have on our platform, so we knew at some point that we would need to bring this capability in house. We examined the players, found that Neutrino had some of the best technology in this area, and decided to acquire them.
However, we had a gap in our diligence process. While we looked hard at the technology and security of the Neutrino product, we did not properly evaluate everything from the perspective of our mission and values as a crypto company. We took some time to dig further into this over the past week, and together with the Neutrino team have come to an agreement: those who previously worked at Hacking Team (despite the fact that they have no current affiliation with Hacking Team), will transition out of Coinbase. This was not an easy decision, but their prior work does present a conflict with our mission. We are thankful to the Neutrino team for engaging with us on this outcome.
Bitcoin — and crypto more generally — is about the rights of the individual and about the technological protection of civil liberties. Coinbase seeks to be the most secure, trusted, and legally compliant bridge to cryptocurrency. We sometimes need to make practical tradeoffs to run a modern, regulated exchange, but we did not make the right tradeoff in this specific case. We will fix it and find another way to serve our customers while complying with the law.
Living up to our values and the Neutrino acquisition was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
