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Posted on July 17, 2019Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019
During the week of June 24, Coinbase.com had two periods of degraded service. On June 25, for a 30 minute period, most customers experienced error messages that prevented them from completing buys, sells, and trades. On June 26, for a 32 minute period, about a third of customers experienced error messages across the site and mobile apps.
Below is a detailed description of the cause as well as the changes we have implemented to prevent any similar service degradations.
June 25
From 15:16 PT to 15:46 PT (22:16–22:46 UTC), buy/sell/trade functionality on Coinbase.com was severely degraded with a 97% error rate. In other words, 97% of buy/sell/trade requests received an error response.
This severe service degradation was caused by an automatic failover of a MongoDB cluster that powers fraud prevention logic as part of a scheduled maintenance. Cluster failovers for scheduled maintenance are typically instantaneous and have minimal customer impact. The failover for this particular cluster lasted 25 minutes due to its size and replication configuration. During this time, queries and commands to the cluster were unable to be completed. Because the cluster is used during the request/response cycles for submitting buys, sells, and trades, requests to these endpoints errored.
We are currently re-architecting trade functionality to move usage of this cluster out of the request path. We are also updating configuration to ensure failovers will be instantaneous going forward. We have ensured that failovers for this cluster may only be initiated during rare, scheduled downtime, when there will be no impact on customers.
June 26th
From 13:37 PT to 14:09 PT (20:37–21:09 UTC), Coinbase.com experienced sustained error rates across all endpoints. Error rates hovered around 35% for the duration of the incident.
This moderate service degradation was caused by sustained increased query latency on a MongoDB cluster that stores user account data. There were several contributing factors that led to increased query latency and degraded service:
- Before the incident began, a background job performed an aggregation for a large number of accounts, causing excessive reads into cache and cache evictions for the cluster’s storage engine cache.
- Soon after, a large number of real-time price alerts were triggered, causing significantly increased query throughput for this cluster.
- Increased query throughput, combined with the prior cache evictions, caused additional cache pressure and resulted in query queueing and increased query latency. These are initial conclusions; in collaboration with MongoDB our investigation is ongoing.
- Due to increased query latency during the request/response cycle, web workers became saturated, serving HTTP 502s.
Storage engine cache activity for the affected cluster The incident was resolved when we manually failed over the affected cluster to instances with more memory. Since the incident, we’ve done the following:
- We’ve audited working set size across all clusters, resizing instances and/or reducing the working set size as necessary.
- We’ve removed the background job and are performing an audit of similar queries, moving them to analytics nodes.
- We’ve tuned certain high-throughput endpoints that are hit hardest during price alerts.
- We’re continuing ongoing work to reduce load on MongoDB through caching and reading from secondary data stores that can be scaled horizontally.
We take uptime very seriously, and we’re working hard to support the millions of customers that choose Coinbase to manage their cryptocurrency. If you’re interested in solving scaling challenges like those presented here, come work with us.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019 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 July 10, 2019Continuous Integration at Coinbase: How we optimized CircleCI for speed & cut our build times by…
Continuous Integration at Coinbase: How we optimized CircleCI for speed and cut our build times by 75%
Tuning a continuous integration server presents an interesting challenge — infrastructure engineers need to balance build speed, cost, and queue times on a system that many developers do not have extensive experience managing at scale. The results, when done right, can be a major benefit to your company as illustrated by the recent journey we took to improve our CI setup.
Continuous Integration at Coinbase
As Coinbase has grown, keeping our developers happy with our internal tools has been a high priority. For most of Coinbase’s history we have used CircleCI server, which has been a performant and low-maintenance tool. As the company and our codebase have grown, however, the demands on our CI server have increased as well. Prior to the optimizations described here, builds for the monorail application that runs Coinbase.com had increased significantly in length (doubling or tripling the previous average build times) and developers commonly complained about lengthy or non-finishing builds.
Our CI builds were no longer meeting our expectations, and it was with the previous issues in mind that we decided to embark on a campaign to get our setup back into shape.
It’s worth sharing here that Coinbase specifically uses the on-premise server version of CircleCI rather than their cloud offering — hosting our own infrastructure is important to us for security reasons, and these concepts specifically apply to self-managed CI clusters.
The Four Golden Signals
We found the first key to optimizing any CI system to be observability, as without a way to measure the effects of your tweaks and changes it’s impossible to truly know whether or not you actually made an improvement. In our case, server-hosted CircleCI uses a nomad cluster for builds, and at the time did not provide any method of monitoring your cluster or the nodes within. We had to build systems of our own, and we decided a good approach would be using the framework of the four golden signals, Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation.
Latency
Latency is the total amount of time it takes to service a request. In a CI system, this can be considered to be the total amount of time a build takes to run from start to finish. Latency is better measured on a per-repo or even per-build basis as build length can vary hugely based on the project.
To measure this, we built a small application that queried CircleCI’s API regularly for build lengths, and then shipped over that information to Datadog to allow us to build graphs and visualizations of average build times. This allowed us to chart the results of our improvement experiments empirically and automatically rather than relying on anecdotal or manually curated results as we had done previously.
CircleCI API results Traffic
Traffic is the amount of demand being placed on your system at any one time. In a CI system, this can be represented by the total number of concurrently running builds.
We were able to measure this by using the same system we built to measure latency metrics. This came in handy when determining the upper and lower bounds for the use of our build resources as it allowed us to see exactly how many jobs were running at any one time.
Errors
Errors are the total amount of requests or calls that fail. In a CI system this can be represented by the total number of builds that fail due to infrastructural reasons. It’s important here to make a distinction between builds that fail correctly, due to tests, linting, code errors, etc. rather than builds that fail due to platform issues.
One issue we encountered was that occasionally AWS would give us “bad” instances when spinning up new builders that would run much slower than a normal “good” instance. Adding error detection into our builder startup scripts allowed us to terminate these and spin up new nodes before they could slow down our running builds.
Saturation
Saturation is how “full” your service is, or how much of your system resources are being used. In a CI system, this is fairly straightforward — how much I/O, CPU, and memory are the builders under load using.
To measure saturation for our setup we were able to tap into cluster metrics by installing a Datadog Agent on each of our builders, which allowed us to get a view into system stats across the cluster.
Datadog job statistics Identifying the Root Cause
Once your monitoring setup is in place it becomes easier to dig into the root cause of build slowdowns. One of the difficulties in diagnosing CI problems without cluster-wide monitoring is that it can be hard to identify which builders are experiencing load at any one time or how that load affects your builds. Latency monitoring can allow you to figure out which builds are taking the longest, and saturation monitoring can allow you to identify the nodes running those builds for closer investigation.
For us, the new latency measuring we added allowed us to quickly confirm what we had previously guessed: not every build was equal. Some builds ran at the quick speeds we had previously been experiencing but other builds would drag on for far longer than we expected.
In our case this discovery was the big breakthrough — once we could quickly identify builds with increased latency and find the saturated nodes the problem quickly revealed itself: resource contention between starting builds! Due to the large number of tests for our larger builds we use CircleCI’s parallelization feature to split up our tests and run them across the fleet in separate docker containers. Each test container also requires another set of support containers (Redis, MongoDB, etc.) in order to replicate the production environment. Starting all of the necessary containers for each build is a resource-intensive operation, requiring significant amounts of I/O and CPU. Since Nomad uses bin-packing for job distributions our builders would sometimes launch up to 5 different sets of these containers at once, causing massive slow-downs before tests could even start running.
Build Experimentation
Setting up a development environment is key to debugging CI problems once found as it allows you to push your system to its limits while ensuring that none of your testing affects productivity in production. Coinbase maintains a development cluster for CircleCI that we use to test out new versions before pushing them out to production, but in order to investigate our options we turned the cluster into a smaller replica of our production instance, allowing us to effectively load test CircleCI builders. Keeping your development cluster as close as possible to production can help ensure any solutions you find are reflective of what can actually help in a real environment.
Once we had identified why our builds were encountering issues, and we’d set up an environment to run experiments in, we could start developing a solution. We repeatedly ran the same large builds that were causing the problems on our production cluster on different sizes and types of EC2 instances in order to figure out which was the most time and cost-effective options to use.
EC2 instance type comparison While we previously had been using smaller numbers of large instances to run our builds it turns out the optimal setup for our cluster was actually a very large number of smaller instances (m5.larges in our case) — small enough that CircleCI would only ship one parallelized build container to each instance, preventing the build trampling issues that were the cause of the slow downs. A nice side effect of identifying the correct instance types was that it actually allowed us to reduce our server cost footprint significantly as we were able to size our cluster more closely to its usage.
Problem? Solved!
Applying your changes to a production environment is the final step. Determining whether the effects of the tuning worked can be done the same way the problems were identified — with the four golden signals.
After we had identified what worked best on our development cluster we quickly implemented the new builder sizing in production. The results? A 75% decrease in build time for our largest builds, significant cost savings due to the right-sizing of our cluster, and most important of all: happy developers!
Builds, before and after 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.
Continuous Integration at Coinbase: How we optimized CircleCI for speed & cut our build times by… 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 July 3, 2019Culture at Coinbase
Below I’m sharing our culture doc for Coinbase, which describes how we work together day-to-day as a company. I’m sharing it publicly because I hope it will help reinforce the importance of building the culture to our current employees, and help attract new employees who might want to work in a culture like this.
I’m really glad that we finally took the time to articulate our culture. In the early days of a company (say less than 150 people) it’s fairly easy to set the culture as CEO just by having regular conversations with all employees and sharing what you think. But past a certain point (some say Dunbar’s number) this becomes impractical, and it helps to actually write it out and communicate it in a more scalable way. Last year, Coinbase went from 250 to 750 people. Our culture began to drift with so many new people joining. My hope is that we can reverse that trend.
Side note: As with all major messages that you want to stick in an organization, you have to communicate it multiple times, through multiple channels, and from multiple people. This blog post is one of those steps for us.
To create the document below, we had conversations with our advisers, our board, and 150+ employees. It went through multiple iterations to incorporate feedback. When I sent it to the team, I shared a few pieces of context:
- It is aspirational. Some of this will feel like it already exists in our culture. Other parts will feel quite different. Our goal as a team is to continually get closer to this ideal (we will likely never be 100% perfect on it).
- This is a reset of expectations. This may be different from what you expected when you joined the company in some ways. That isn’t great (and I take responsibility for that). The good news is that we now have clear expectations going forward.
- Our culture is a remix. Many of these ideas are not original. While there isn’t one company’s culture we want to emulate 100%, we were inspired by companies like Netflix, Amazon, Google, and others. We took some ideas we liked and put our own twist on them.
There are six tenets of our culture, with a set of actions under each one. I hope you find them useful.
The Coinbase Culture Doc
Top talent in every seat
Raise the bar with every hire
We over invest in finding top talent, knowing that recruiting and developing top talent is the root cause of all our success. We prefer to occasionally miss out on a good hire rather than make a bad hire (in other words we intentionally have a conservative hiring process). When deciding on a candidate, we coach interviewers to ask themselves questions like:
- Will this person raise the average on my team?
- Did I leave my interview more inspired and engaged than when I went in?
- Is this person much better than me in at least one area?
- Could this person start adding value right away? (e.g. would they take work off my plate or create more work for me)
If the answer to any one of those questions is “no” or even “maybe,” then we ask interviewers to round down to “no.” We never treat an absence of red flags as a reason to hire someone. We ask every interviewer to only vote yes if they are a “hell yes”, otherwise we vote no.
To implement the above, we don’t let managers make unilateral hiring decisions at Coinbase. However, we also don’t require 100% of interviewers to be a “hell yes” for a candidate to be hired (some of our best hires have been polarizing in interviews). Instead, we choose a middle ground: we include a “bar raiser” in every hiring panel, and both the hiring manager and bar raiser need to be a hell yes for a candidate to be hired, incorporating the input from everyone on the hiring panel.
Hiring is everyone’s responsibility
Hiring and developing top talent in every seat is how people advance at Coinbase. This is true across the org: managers are promoted based on their ability to attract and develop top talent, and all employees are asked to make referrals, prioritize interviews, and help sell candidates.
Be inclusive
We have a goal to put top talent in every seat, and we work hard to fight the bias that might lead us to miss out on hiring and developing great people. Finding top talent requires us to cast the widest net possible and understand unique strengths and capabilities of all kinds of people. We are rigorous about hiring based on skills and values, but outside of this, we welcome people from every background and set of experiences.
Both skills and values are required (not one or the other)
Having the right skills is critical, but not sufficient. Value-alignment and a team-first mentality are must-haves. We don’t tolerate brilliant jerks. A candidate might not meet every value (four out of four), but we are excited about them as long as they demonstrate humility, curiosity, and flexibility to adapt to any values they may not come in with.
How we live this today
- Hiring managers can’t make unilateral hiring decisions: a Bar Raiser can veto any hire in addition to the hiring manager.
- Our first 100 hires had to complete a one-week work trial (take time off work to come interview).
- We do reference checks on every hire.
- We apply the Rooney Rule on all senior hires and internal transfers.
What we won’t do
- Hire candidates we are lukewarm on, even when we need to urgently fill a gap in the org
- Assume only an external, expert hire can solve our biggest challenges
Play as a championship team
Celebrate the opportunity
If you choose to join Coinbase, you will work with and learn from the best. There is joy in developing these professional relationships, working for a market leader, developing crypto knowledge, and building personal wealth. We have opportunities to step into massive stretch roles, take on huge responsibility, and rise to the challenge.
Sustained high performance
We are regularly pushed out of our comfort zones. A lot is asked of us: excellence in our work, solving hard challenges, 100% accountability for our actions, and an ownership mentality (often requiring long hours). We rest and recover when needed, but make ourselves available if we are the blocker on a key item. If someone isn’t raising the team average, we work with them to improve. However, if it becomes a consistent pattern, we make the difficult but necessary decision to part ways with them for the good of the team.
Be company first
We prioritize team goals over individual goals, because we all benefit most from the success of the parent company. We do this by creating win-win situations with humility, curiosity, and solutions-oriented optimism. We’re stronger together, so we reject tribalism and division, instead choosing to focus on what unites us.
Default to trust
When we see something that doesn’t make sense at first glance, we default to trust by assuming good intentions. We trust the motivations and capabilities of our teammates instead of presuming a mistake. At the same time, we’re not afraid to dig deeper, and ask questions from a place of curiosity. We approach conversations with a desire to learn and understand, not a desire to be right.
How we live this today
- We don’t donate to political parties — because this created an unnecessary source of division in the company. We choose to focus on what unites us instead.
- We discourage internal competition, instead asking everyone to put their company hat on.
What we won’t do
- Only celebrate the individual above the whole
- Foster internal competition
- Ask one product to be worse, to elevate another product
Be candid and kind
Default to open
Sharing context helps everyone get their job done. It also builds trust and strengthens relationships in the org. Therefore, we strive to be as transparent as possible with all information in the company. This includes bad news — we share it as soon as we can, because we know it doesn’t age well.
However, we don’t share everything openly. For instance, we won’t share performance reviews, negative feedback, and personnel matters (such as reasons for people’s departure) with the company. We also keep in-flight Biz Dev and Corp Dev deals (partnerships and acquisitions) private, since we are coordinating with a third party.
Reveal what you think
We proactively share our points of view with teammates. When we withhold these thoughts, we rob the team of our wisdom and fail to make them better. This extends beyond team dynamics and product strategy: If we see something unethical or if we are unhappy, it is our job to speak up.
Importantly, this kind of “revealing” should happen in the moment as much as possible. We avoid back-channel “meetings after the meeting” and gossip. We share with others only what we would say if the other person was in the room.
Embrace delivering and receiving feedback
We would rather share information that makes people a tad uncomfortable than withhold it to protect feelings, but if delivered carelessly, candor can do more harm than good. Feedback should always be directed at the work, not the person (e.g. “your presentation fell short of the mark,” not “you fell short of the mark”). Positive feedback should be given in public, and negative feedback should generally be given in private. The intent of all feedback must be to help our colleagues (and the team) improve, never to harm. We deliver it with kindness and without a commitment to being right.
We commit to asking for feedback regularly, and creating a safe space for others to speak up. We listen consciously for the underlying truth. We replay what we hear, ask if there is more, invite requests, and create clear agreements going forward. It’s our job to ask for feedback from our managers, peers, and reports. We welcome feedback from all sources — an intern can give feedback to the CEO on their first day.
How we live this today
- Expect two-way feedback in every 1:1.
- Brian periodically shares his performance review with the company.
- At Brian’s employee lunches he gives $20 (in crypto) to the person who gives him the most raw feedback (even if it hurts his feelings).
- We have a dedicated discussion channel and weekly AMAs where any employee can ask any question of the leadership team.
- We share key company metrics with all employees.
What we won’t do
- Conceal our thoughts during a meeting, and share them after the meeting
- Gossip — the test for this is “would you say it the same way if the person was in the room now?”
- Encourage only top-down feedback
Focus on the customer
Improve usability
To help one billion people benefit from crypto, we have to make it dramatically easier to use. As people who work in technology, we are anomalies in the world. While we and most people we know are probably comfortable using technology, we remember this is not true of the average person.
We should always push to make our products easier to use. We avoid using technical jargon like “private key,” “force quit,” or “hash” in our products and when communicating with customers. Imagine a product so simple that anyone can use it, even if they are illiterate. We aim to educate our customers as they use our products, preparing them to benefit from the cryptoeconomy.
Bring economic freedom to the world
We have an opportunity to improve our customers’ lives by giving them access to sound money, basic property rights, ways to get a loan, and even to start a business. We enable people to emigrate with their wealth intact. Everyone deserves to be free from corruption, abuse, and bribery.
Our global aspirations mean we are a global company. Our goal is to serve customers in as many countries around the world as we can. We operate in many different regulatory environments around the world, and we don’t apply a single standard to all of them. We build products and operate in the way that serves each of our customers best.
Make money for our customers
Sometimes we see a way to launch a feature that will generate money for Coinbase, but harm our customers in the long term. If we make money at our customer’s expense, we may win in the short term, but will lose in the long term. We believe that if customers make money it’s also good for us long term, because they will be more willing to share a portion of their upside with us.
We recognize that storing people’s money comes with a great deal of responsibility. Losing $100 for one customer may be just as painful as losing $1M for another. Every customer is putting their trust in our hands, so when it comes to security, compliance, and the operations of the company, we should focus on quality, and get it right the first time.
How we live this today
- We have customers in over 100 countries today.
- Products go to “Brian Review” to meet a quality bar on usability.
- We do not rush to add new assets to the platform, instead taking time to evaluate and integrate them thoughtfully.
- We launched educational products (like Coinbase Earn) to help customers to make more informed buying decisions.
What we won’t do
- Prioritize shareholders over our customers (which we believe actually benefits long term shareholders even more)
- Be so customer focused that it harms our long term prospects — the more capital we have, the more likely we are to accomplish our mission and drive more economic freedom
Foster repeatable innovation
Accelerate progress
We have the opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation in the world by building an open financial system. Our vision is to create more economic freedom in the world, to help people control their own wealth, start companies, have financial privacy, and participate in the global economy. We don’t want to be a one hit wonder as a company. Instead, we choose to foster a culture of repeatable innovation and celebrate being a multi-product company. We make calculated bets and always look to the horizon to see what we can build next.
Disrupt ourselves (before someone else does)
We work to preserve the founding moment — staying hungry and foolish, building just because it is fun (we recognize play as an important source of creativity), ignoring naysayers, rapidly prototyping, and making it okay to ship embarrassing first versions. This ensures we always have space to build what’s coming next.
We’re not afraid to create a new product that disrupts one of our existing products, as long as it will help our customers. We think it’s okay if a competitor to one of our products is a customer of another. We invest in the broader cryptoeconomy, outside of Coinbase’s products.
We don’t let process or risk aversion ossify us. We shelter and protect new initiatives, recognizing that it’s easy for these “green shoots” to get trampled in a larger organization.
Celebrate thoughtful failure
We strive to become excellent at failure — and work to extract the lesson from every misstep. If some of our projects aren’t failing, we aren’t thinking big enough. We differentiate between great work toward a hypothesis that didn’t pan out and poor work toward a good hypothesis. We avoid over correction when things don’t work out, knowing that it might prevent us from taking reasonable risks in the future.
Hire builders
We hire people who are passionate about creating new products with technology. We look for entrepreneurs who are comfortable with ambiguity. We prefer to work with people who actually execute toward ideas, instead of just coming up with them. When the creative moment strikes, we try not to let big company process get in the way or slow them down.
How we live this today
- We invested in Coinbase Wallet and Commerce during crypto winter of 2015.
- 10% of our resources are invested in experimental, innovative projects.
- The first version of Coinbase merchant tools shipped in a weekend.
- More than 40% of our employees are engineers.
What we won’t do
- Bias for minimizing downside
- When something bad happens, over index on process to make sure it doesn’t happen again
- Stick with what works. Make incremental improvement. Rest on our laurels.
Act like an owner
Take 100% responsibility
Each one of us is empowered to make this company a success. We seek out ways to improve our products, culture, and the company overall, even in ways that are not explicitly part of our job. While surfacing problems is expected, it is always better to pair them with proposed solutions. Sam Altman once framed it like this: “If you notice something below standards, and don’t fix it or make sure someone else does, you have set a new standard. Complaining about it does not count as fixing it. If someone gets upset/tells you to stay in your lane, they’ve set an even worse new standard.” We cultivate a mentality that we can have an impact on our surroundings.
Don’t get stuck
Solving hard problems requires us to explore non-obvious and creative solutions — when we get a “no”, we are polite but persistent, and do what we can to find the “yes.” We work to understand the root cause of the no and solicit diverse perspectives on how to move forward. We know that action produces information. We speak to our network, think outside the box, prioritize options, and keep moving.
Think long term
We work to do what’s right for the long-term success of the company and our mission. We don’t over-rotate on this quarter, this week, or this day. We aren’t distracted by the hype cycle, by crypto prices, or by the successes or failures of our competitors. We stay focused on what’s coming, give emerging projects the resources to succeed, and remind ourselves of the outsized, positive impact we can have on the world over many decades.
How we live this today
- We hire and attract many entrepreneurs to work at Coinbase. In addition, many Coinbase employees have gone on to start successful companies (often in the crypto space).
- Engineers regularly ship small fixes, even if they aren’t on their roadmap or OKRs.
- Any employee can submit a “problem + proposed solution” document in writing if they notice an issue.
- If we notice paper accumulating in the bathroom, we might pick it up, but we also follow up with facilities to see if we can solve the root cause.
- We chose to pursue a compliant and regulated strategy from the beginning, even though it hurt our growth and revenue in the short term, because we felt it was the right long term bet.
What we won’t do
- Focus on who is to blame — all outcomes are co-created
- Defer to Leadership as having a greater share of the responsibility (top down)
- Make assumptions that “that’s just the way it is done here”
- Color inside the lines
Hopefully you found this post useful to better understand Coinbase’s culture, and maybe even to help define your own company culture.
If this sounds like a culture that you might want to be a part of, please check out our open roles and apply for a position.
Culture 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 June 28, 2019Chainlink (LINK) is now available on Coinbase
Starting today, Coinbase supports Chainlink (LINK) at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store LINK.
LINK will be available for customers in most jurisdictions, but will not initially be available for residents of the state of New York. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.
Chainlink (LINK) is an Ethereum token that powers the Chainlink decentralized oracle network. This network allows smart contracts on Ethereum to securely connect to external data sources, APIs, and payment systems.
One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to buy and sell more cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. In September, 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 LINK 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 LINK today.
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.
Chainlink (LINK) 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 June 28, 2019The United States of Crypto
Celebrating Independence Day and Ideals such as Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Economic Freedom
In the past year, crypto has continued to grow by awareness and enthusiasm in the US, as more people view the technology as a compelling new way to participate in the financial system. In the latest Coinbase Report, we outline findings on the growing interest in cryptocurrencies on the part of Americans, on a state-by-state level.
Key Findings From Coinbase Research
- Currently, 58 percent of Americans say they’ve heard of Bitcoin.
- Over the past year, more people searched on Google for Bitcoin than the “royal wedding” or “election results.”
- To date, more than 70 percent of US States have enacted legislation that addresses cryptocurrency or blockchain.
- Crypto is becoming an increasingly important aspect of local economies. The top 10 US States for percentage of the population that owns crypto are: California, New Jersey, Washington, New York, Colorado, Utah, Florida, Alaska, Nevada, and Massachusetts.
If you want to get a sense of how interested America is in a topic, there aren’t many better benchmarks than Kim Kardashian, whose social-media dominance gives her an outsized slice of our collective consciousness. Since the beginning of this year, one of the rare ideas that grabbed even more of our attention is Bitcoin. On average, Google users have searched for Bitcoin more often than they sought out info on Kim K., and that number is only trending upwards. In late June — as prices climbed — Google searches for Bitcoin surged to almost three times higher than searches for Kardashian. And it’s not just the reality TV star. Americans typed ‘Bitcoin’ into Google more times last year than they searched for a range of headline-making phrases, from “royal wedding” to “election results.”
Americans typed ‘Bitcoin’ into Google more times last year than they searched for a range of headline-making phrases, from “royal wedding” to “election results.”
In other words, Bitcoin is going mainstream in America—even though Bitcoin is just a decade old (its birthday was in January), it has captured the imagination and attention of Americans all over. Today, Coinbase is sharing a report on awareness and adoption trends related to crypto in America, such as which US States have the highest rates of participation and where enthusiasm is highest. This study includes original research conducted by YouGov for Coinbase in December 2018 as well as research data derived from macro-level Coinbase user activity, which is reported in anonymized and aggregate form only.
We also look into the increasing number of states where legislatures have enacted proactive regulations around cryptocurrency and blockchain as a response to local demand and interest in the technology. Finally, we spoke to a range of current Coinbase customers — regular people of varying ages, careers, and locations across the country — to learn the who, where, and why around interest in crypto.
Increasing awareness
When given a list of cryptocurrencies to choose from, Coinbase research shows that 58 percent of Americans have heard of Bitcoin. People express a range of reasons for their participation, from a desire to add diversity to their investment portfolios to a deeply felt belief in the transformative potential of a secure and decentralized currency.
“The most appealing thing about crypto and Bitcoin to me is the idea of a worldwide currency — that it can cross borders without having to factor in exchange rates or high transfer fees or long delays,” says Christopher, a 26-year-old small business owner in New Jersey. “Say I want to move to another country someday? My cryptocurrency would automatically come with me. My whole journey is not a get-rich idea. I just really believe in crypto and want the technology to succeed.”
Crypto, from state to state
Across the country, 37 percent of Americans — without being prompted with a list of options — proactively name Bitcoin in response to a query about cryptocurrencies.
But that number goes up substantially in certain states. In Wisconsin and Utah, 57 percent of people have unaided awareness of Bitcoin, with Colorado, Massachusetts, and Wyoming close behind. And even the fact that there are still places where awareness is low feels like an opportunity to some people currently involved in crypto. “Cryptocurrency is right alongside artificial intelligence and nanotechnology as cutting-edge tech that has the potential to transform the way we live,” says Todd, a 49-year-old IT supervisor in Northern Virginia. “And lots of regular people still have barely heard of it.”
The top five states with the highest percentage of crypto-owning population are California, New Jersey, Washington, New York, and Colorado, according to Coinbase research. (Interestingly enough, Alaska ranks 8th on the list for highest percentage of crypto-owners, but it also comes in lowest in unaided brand awareness for Bitcoin, at 18 percent.)
Several of the top states for crypto-owners (California, New York, and Washington) also have the biggest per-capita holdings — that is to say, they have a large number of people who not only own crypto, but also have larger holdings. Interestingly, there’s yet another category, which includes states with a lower overall percentage of crypto holders, but a higher per-capita ownership — that is, a smaller number of people who each hold a larger than average chunk of cryptocurrency. The states with the most of those people, adjusted for population, are Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming.
What’s driving demand
For some people, the investment opportunity presented by cryptocurrency is a major driver of their interest. “For people in my generation, I think it makes a lot more sense than stocks, bonds, inflated real estate, or other depreciating assets,” says Harrison, a 30-year-old systems manager in Washington State. “I have no plans to trade or sell right now — there are price points where I might sell some, to pay off debt or pay off my condo. But the goal is to try to get actual economic freedom.” Similarly, Todd notes that crypto opens up a new form of access to investments. “A lot of the best alternative investment opportunities—not correlated to the stock market—are only available to accredited investors, which is a tiny part of the American population,” he says. “Cryptocurrency is available to everyone.”
Others are participating in crypto as a way of educating themselves. Brenda is a 30-year-old CPA who lives in Puerto Rico. She started practicing recently and notes that her field provides little training around crypto, and so she purchased some in an effort to understand it for her clients. “I need to be able to explain this new technology, and the best way for me to understand it was to try it myself,” she says.”
The opportunity to experience new technology as it is emerging is another key motivation. “I’m just very interested in new technology,” says Elena, 35, a graphic designer who lives in New York. “I actually studied cryptography and computer science in college, so it was easy for me to understand. I’d love to find a job working on crypto or blockchain technology.” (According to a recent Coinbase study, 42 percent of the world’s top 50 universities offer at least one course on crypto or blockchain, and students from a wide range of disciplines are increasingly interested in taking courses on the technology.)
A look at legislation
As interest increases, states are increasingly enacting legislation to address crypto and blockchain. As of June 2019, more than 70 percent of U.S. States have enacted regulations that account for cryptocurrency or blockchain technology. In April, Ohio announced it would accept tax payments in Bitcoin. “We’re trying to do our small part to … think creatively about how technology can make taxpayers’ lives easier,” said Josh Mandel, former Ohio State Treasurer and supporter of the effort, in an interview with NPR’s Marketplace. (Overstock.com, for one, took advantage of the opportunity, using Bitcoin to pay around $35,000 in taxes.)
“We’re trying to do our small part to … think creatively about how technology can make taxpayers’ lives easier”
Earlier this year, Wyoming passed a set of thirteen laws that, among other things, recognize crypto as money and allow banks to “provide custodial services for digital assets.” With these regulations, the mountain state hopes to become the legal home to banks that could offer asset management and other crypto services to customers nationwide. And since 2015, New York State’s financial regulatory agency has awarded eighteen of what it calls BitLicenses to virtual currency companies that want to broker Wall Street-style trades or other deals on clients’ behalf.
How interested are Americans in buying crypto? According to Coinbase research, upwards of 15% of Americans are “somewhat” or “very” likely to buy Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency in the near future. The number gets even higher with big-league investors: the asset-management giant Fidelity Investments announced in May that 22 percent of its institutional investors already own digital assets, that almost half would consider adding crypto to their portfolios.
As for the growth in awareness, that seems poised to continue; YouTube searches for Bitcoin reached their all-time high this year. New Jersey customer Christopher explains how he pulled clips from YouTube to create a Powerpoint presentation that he used to explain Bitcoin to his baby-boomer father. “I grabbed some video, grabbed some pictures, and broke it down in a way that he could understand,” he says. “Now he also has his own personal crypto, and whenever his coins go up, he’ll send me a screenshot. It’s something we really bond over.”
Sources and methodology: All data referenced comes either from public sources, from research data derived from Coinbase user activity, which is reported in anonymized and aggregate form only, and from research conducted on behalf of Coinbase by YouGov. The YouGov study was conducted in December 2018 and included 2,000 U.S. internet users over the age of 18 in the general population.
The United States of 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 June 27, 2019Customer spotlight: Bitwise
As Coinbase Custody continues toward its goal of being the world’s leading crypto-custodian, we want to highlight the innovative institutions that have chosen to join us on our journey. In this new series, we will dive into some of the companies that are helping to build the institutional cryptoeconomy, and get to know what makes them different and, importantly, how they’re thinking about the future of crypto.
Bitwise: A pioneer in the crypto asset management space.
Bitwise has been a leader in the world of cryptocurrency asset management ever since creating the world’s first cryptocurrency index fund, the Bitwise 10 Private Index Fund, in 2017. It serves a diverse set of investors, from family offices and financial advisors to pensions, endowments, foundations, and high net worth individuals.
One thing Bitwise clients have in common is that they are often new entrants into the cryptocurrency markets. “Most of our clients are making their very first crypto investments with us. We need to help get them comfortable with the idea of crypto as an investable asset class, and help them understand their options for how to implement in the safest ways possible. Working with a company like Coinbase Custody that has state of the art security, an impeccable reputation, and a regulated entity that provides custody services helps us build trust with our clients,” offered Bitwise’s Chief Operating Officer, Teddy Fusaro.
As part of their diligence, Bitwise clients need to understand not only a fund’s investment objective and performance profile, they also need to understand how it is operated, particularly since crypto works differently than traditional investable assets.
“Once an allocator decides to invest in crypto, they need to trust that the things they expect from their existing investments — auditability, credible third-party custody, operational best practices — are there for their crypto investments as well. We’ve built Bitwise from the ground up with this in mind, and it’s critical to us that our partners have too,” Fusaro added.
One example of this institutional-grade focus is asset insurance, an ever evolving issue that requires a lot of education for LPs and investors. All too often, it’s an unnecessary stumbling block for funds to invest in crypto. “It’s clear to me that there is a lot of confusion around cryptocurrency insurance,” offered Coinbase Chief Information Security Officer, Philip Martin, in a recent blog post. “Coinbase has held an insurance policy covering cryptocurrency in our hot storage systems continually since November 19, 2013. We currently hold a hot wallet policy with a $255 million limit placed by Lloyd’s registered broker Aon and sourced from a global group of US and UK insurance companies, including certain Lloyd’s of London syndicates,” he continued. “Lack of insurance simply shouldn’t be a limiting factor for institutional investors any longer.”
“At the end of the day, the most important thing that we build with our clients is trust — trust that we can deliver what we say we will in a way that is as safe and secure as possible,” continued Bitwise’s Fusaro.
“Our choice of partners is critical in this regard, particularly when it comes to crypto custody. It’s Bitwise’s goal to be the leading brand in crypto asset management and in order to do that we rely on other trusted leaders in the industry like Coinbase Custody. When we’re speaking with clients and prospective clients they need to know we’re providing them with a product that’s built on a team and partner ecosystem that’s simply beyond reproach. Coinbase is uniquely situated within the industry to help us build that trust with our clients.”
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.
Customer spotlight: Bitwise 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 June 26, 2019Chainlink (LINK) is launching on Coinbase Pro
Transfer LINK immediately into your Coinbase Pro account ahead of trading. Support for LINK will be available in all Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State. Additional regions may be added at a later date.
After 10am PT on June 26, 2019, we will begin accepting inbound transfers of LINK to Coinbase Pro. We will accept deposits for at least 12 hours prior to enabling full trading.
Once sufficient supply of LINK is established on the platform, trading on the LINK/USD, and LINK/ETH 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 LINK will be immediately available in all Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State. Additional jurisdictions may be added at a later date.
Chainlink (LINK) is an Ethereum token that powers the Chainlink decentralized oracle network. This network allows smart contracts on Ethereum to securely connect to external data sources, APIs, and payment systems.
Please note that LINK 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 this 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 10am PT on June 26, customers will be able to transfer LINK 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 at least 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 LINK on Coinbase Pro, visit our support page.
Chainlink (LINK) 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 June 20, 2019New real-time price alerts for the Coinbase app
Today, we’re introducing real-time price alerts for any cryptocurrency supported by Coinbase, available in the Coinbase mobile app. Now, automatically find out when the market moves on the crypto you care about most — no need to go check websites or your app. Combined with in-app news and our informational asset pages, this feature is another step forward in making the Coinbase app the best place for you to find the information you want on crypto.
Tracking crypto prices in real-time has historically required crypto investors to check a variety of websites or applications, which can be inconvenient. As a result, it can be difficult to decide when to buy or sell, or just educate yourself on market performance. Today we’re launching price alerts for all tradable assets on Coinbase, built to meet your need for smart, automated alerts about your crypto portfolio — no manual work required.
Here’s how price alerts work: Next time you update your Coinbase mobile app, you’ll be prompted to enable notifications. Once enabled, you’ll receive price alerts for any cryptocurrencies on your Watchlist. Consumers can opt into alerts for certain assets, and when the prices of those assets shift substantially up or down, you’ll receive an alert informing you of the percentage change.
Our goal is to provide Coinbase customers with the information you want to make more informed decisions about crypto. Over time, we’ll expand price alerts to include assets not yet tradable on Coinbase. We’re excited about price alerts’ potential to empower crypto experts, educate newcomers to the space, and continue engaging people in crypto.
Price alerts are provided for informational purposes only, and do not constitute a recommendation by Coinbase to buy, sell or hold any asset.
New real-time price alerts for the Coinbase app 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 June 11, 2019Coinbase Card is now available in Europe
From today, Coinbase Card will be available in six new countries across Europe, enabling customers in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, and the Netherlands to spend their crypto effortlessly.
Coinbase Card lets anyone with a Coinbase account in a supported country spend their crypto instantly worldwide. Since launching in the UK, Coinbase Card users have been spending their crypto as easily as the money in their bank accounts. From grocery shopping, to cocktails and dinner dates, Coinbase Card has become the go-to card in our customers’ wallets.
To get started, download the iOS or Android app today and securely sign in using your Coinbase account. Once a Coinbase Card has been requested, customers will join the waitlist.
After the waitlist closes, your crypto balance held on Coinbase will be immediately available to use through the in-app virtual card, and a contactless Coinbase Card will be sent in the post.
We’re constantly working to make the Coinbase Card experience even better. In the coming months, we’ll be introducing brand new features, as well as bringing the card to even more customers around the globe. Keep up to date by following us on Twitter @CoinbaseCard, or learn more by visiting coinbase.com/card.
This card is issued by Paysafe Financial Services Limited. Paysafe Financial Services Limited is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011(FRN: 900015) for the issuing of electronic money and payment instruments.
Coinbase Card is now available in Europe 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 June 10, 2019Earn DAI while learning about the stablecoin and how it’s generated
Customers can now earn DAI on Coinbase
Starting today, Coinbase customers around the world can start earning DAI by watching lessons and completing quizzes about DAI and its features. DAI is the first stablecoin to be made available through Coinbase Earn. Coinbase strives to be a trusted source where customers can educate themselves about new developments in crypto, and we’re excited to offer people a new opportunity to learn about and earn DAI.
According to the DAI whitepaper, DAI is a decentralized stablecoin running on Ethereum and designed with a goal of maintaining a target value of approximately $1 USD. DAI is backed by collateral on the Maker (MKR) platform. The relevant whitepapers explain that MKR and DAI tokens form a paired set of assets in which MKR provides governance, and DAI is a decentralized, collateral-backed stablecoin.
We expect earning to become an increasingly important function in the crypto ecosystem — alongside buying, staking, voting, and mining — especially when paired with education.
If you want to stay informed about future opportunities, please make sure you have verified your ID and opted into getting the latest updates from Coinbase!
You can also check out the newly-launched Coinbase Earn homepage to keep up to date with the latest Earn opportunities. Click here for our Earn FAQ and terms.
Earn DAI while learning about the stablecoin and how it’s generated was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
