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Posted on February 27, 2020Onboarding thousands of users with React Native
A retrospective for companies considering React Native
Source: engineering.fb.com By Ian Ownbey, Nick Cherry, and Jacob Thornton
In mid-2019, we committed to rewriting Coinbase’s core mobile sign-up with React Native. This decision was motivated by a few observations:
- Coinbase currently supports over 100 countries. Because different jurisdictions have different regulatory requirements (e.g. Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering), our sign-up experience needs to be dynamic — adapting to each user’s location and identity profile. Unfortunately, these flows were some of the oldest, most complex parts of our mobile apps; even incremental changes could be expensive to implement. In order for us to support more countries faster (and more safely), we needed to make our mobile onboarding code much more robust. Given the state of the app, we estimated that rewriting the sign-up flows from scratch would be significantly faster than trying to refactor the existing code.
- As mentioned above, our sign-up flow involves a great deal of business logic. Rewriting the sign-up experience natively would require a non-trivial amount of code duplication, and maintaining parity between our iOS and Android apps (something we’ve struggled with historically) would be costly. However, if we implemented the module with React Native, we could target multiple platforms. This would allow us to re-use most (if not all) of the business logic and ensure behavioral consistency between all of our apps.
- Coming into this project, the Coinbase mobile apps were fully native and the Coinbase Pro mobile app was written entirely with React Native. We wanted to share our new sign-up experience with both products, and we expected that integrating a React Native package would be less expensive than embedding native modules.
So far, the project has been a success, increasing our team’s velocity and enabling us to share the sign-up flow across products and platforms. Ultimately, we feel like we’ve made the right decision investing in React Native. With a team of five engineers, we’ve rewritten the entire sign-up flow from scratch and shipped to both Coinbase and Coinbase Pro on iOS with support for Android being worked on now. We’ve learned a lot about React Native in the process and want to take the time to share the highlights and lowlights of our experience.
The Good Parts
If we were to reduce the benefits of React Native to a single word, it would be “velocity”. On average, our team was able to onboard engineers in less time, share more code (which we expect will lead to future productivity boosts), and ultimately deliver features faster than if we had taken a purely native approach. We accomplished this while maintaining a high bar for quality, and we believe the finished product is indistinguishable from a fully native app. There were many factors that contributed to these wins, and in the following sections, we’ll discuss some of the most important ones.
Components
Components are composable JavaScript functions that accept immutable inputs (called “props”) and return React elements describing what should appear on the screen. They are the fundamental building blocks of any React app and make it easy for engineers to split their UIs into self-contained, reusable pieces.
For the onboarding rewrite, we created a family of components comprised of form elements (e.g. buttons, text inputs), text elements (e.g. headings, paragraph text), layout elements (e.g. screens, spacers), and more complex UI widgets (e.g. date inputs, progress bars, modals). With the exception of the date input, all components were written entirely in TypeScript.
Most of the core components were created early in the project’s lifecycle. These reusable building blocks enabled engineers to move very quickly when building out screens, which is mostly an exercise in describing interfaces with declarative markup. For example, below is the code used for creating our phone verification screen:
const config = {
name: 'PhoneScreen',
formShape: { phoneNumber: '', countryCode: 'US' },
optionsShape: { analytics: {} },};
export default createScreen(config, ({ Form, isLoading, options }) => {
const { phoneNumber, countryCode } = useFields(Form);
const [submit, isSubmittable] = useSubmitter(Form);return (
<AnalyticsContext.Provider value={options.analytics}>
<Screen>
<Header>
Set up 2-step verification
</Header><Paragraph type="muted">
Enter your phone number so we can text you an authentication code.
</Paragraph><PhoneInput
{...phoneNumber}
countryCodeValue={countryCode.value}
label="Phone"
keyboardType="phone-pad"
onCountryCodeChange={countryCode.onChange}
placeholder="Your phone number"
returnKeyType="done"
validators={[
[required, 'Phone number is a required field.'],
[phoneNumberValidator, 'Please enter a valid phone number.'],
]}
/><Spacer />
<Button
disabled={!isSubmittable}
isLoading={isLoading}
name="continue"
onPress={submit}
>
Continue
</Button>
</Screen>
</AnalyticsContext.Provider>
)
});Each component was designed to be themeable from the start, which helped us adhere to a design system and ensure visual consistency across the module. The theme provider also makes it trivial to uniformly adjust styling (e.g. colors, typefaces, sizes, padding, etc.) either globally or for a given set of screens.
Lastly, because components lend themselves nicely to encapsulation, we were often able to parallelize development efforts around these units, as engineers could work on various parts of the app with minimal dependence on one another. This was beneficial to our velocity and our ability to schedule work effectively.
Fast Refresh
Fast Refresh is a React Native feature that allows engineers to get near-instant feedback for changes in their React components. When a TypeScript file is modified, Metro will regenerate the the JavaScript bundle (For incremental builds, this typically takes less than a second), and the simulator or development device will automatically refresh its UI to reflect the latest code. In many cases, the full state of the application can be retained, but when dependencies outside the React tree are modified, Fast Refresh will fall back to performing a full reload. When a full reload occurs, the app loses most of its state, but engineers still get the benefit of seeing the effects of their changes nearly instantly.
Fast Refresh significantly boosted productivity when creating core components and screens, as both tasks are very visual and iterative in nature.
The functionality was also helpful when developing against API endpoints, as it enabled engineers to tweak the API client and perform network requests without needing to configure the application state (e.g. access tokens, form data) after every change.
Even when UI and state retention were not particularly relevant (e.g. when working on business logic within the framework), the ability to manually test code in seconds (as opposed to tens of seconds) is a huge win for productivity, as engineers are not constantly making the trade-off of either context-switching or sitting idly while they wait for the compiler.
Learning Curve for React/Web Engineers
There are a few notable differences between writing React code for a React Native app versus a web-based app:
- The component primitives are different. For example, in React Native engineers will use View and Text elements, where web engineers would use div or span.
- Unlike CSS, styles applied to elements in React Native do not cascade. For example, setting a font-family in a root-level container does not apply the typeface to its children.
- React Native often requires engineers to have some familiarity with native development tools, like XCode and Android Studio. For example, even when using a third-party library that requires no Objective-C coding, an engineer may need to modify a permission in a plist file.
- Mobile devices have features, limitations, and quirks that web engineers may not be familiar with. For example, logic to retry requests during periods of intermittent connectivity is more nuanced for mobile apps than for web.
In our experience, most of these differences were easily surmountable for web engineers, who were able to be productive in a React Native context almost immediately. Considering that the vast majority of the sign-up flow was written in TypeScript (i.e. only a tiny portion of the app required any custom native code), this substantially contributed to our velocity.
It should be noted that developing a deep familiarity with the native environment is undoubtedly the most challenging part of transitioning from web to React Native. This is also one of the reasons why it is invaluable to have native engineers as part of teams working with React Native.
Code-Sharing
iOS + Android
The vast majority of the new sign-up flow was written in TypeScript that is functional on both iOS and Android devices out of the box. One exception to this was needing to write our own native module to take advantage of the native iOS Date Picker, which will be required to productionize for Android. Even with this extra overhead, we expect that the velocity benefits of sharing an estimated 95% of the code and having parity between the two platforms will be well worth the cost.
Coinbase + Coinbase Pro
We shipped the new sign-up screens as an internal NPM package that is currently being utilized by both the Coinbase app, written in Swift, and the Coinbase Pro iOS app which is written entirely in React Native. Adding support for Coinbase Pro cost an estimated two weeks of engineering time, with most of the efforts going into 1) explorations around how to best support both greenfield and brownfield React Native implementations and 2) abstracting authentication logic (e.g. granting and refreshing access tokens) to allow host applications to provide their own custom implementations. Similar to supporting both iOS and Android, we expect that the benefits of sharing the entire sign-up screens codebase between Coinbase and Coinbase Pro will be worth the extra overhead.
React Native + Web
We have a number of internal libraries at Coinbase which are utilized in our web stack, and by utilizing React Native we were able to take advantage of some of them. Especially useful was an internal library that was written to manage form state, validation and submission. Since this was an important part of the project we were able to use it with pretty minor changes, enabling the library to be shared between web and mobile. Conceivably, React Native and web could share any code that 1) can be extracted to an NPM package and 2) isn’t tightly coupled to UI primitives (e.g. div, View). For example, API clients, localization modules, and various utilities (e.g. crypto address parsers, currency formatters) could all be candidates for sharing.
TypeScript
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. It is commonly used for developing React Native apps and has capabilities similar to Swift and Kotlin.
While TypeScript does come with a learning curve and possibly a higher upfront cost to write (compared to vanilla JavaScript), we believe the safety, ease of maintenance, and IDE enhancements it enabled were invaluable. Without a type-safe abstraction on top of JavaScript, many of the framework-level changes that were required throughout the project would have been significantly more challenging and error-prone. Especially given the slow release cadence (relative to web) of mobile apps, we feel that the extra confidence provided by a typed language is essential.
The Hard Parts
While our overall experience with React Native has been positive, the journey was not without its bumps. In the following sections, we’ll discuss some of the challenges we faced, including the native-to-React-Native learning curve, complications of targeting multiple platforms, and the sharp edges that come with emerging technologies.
Learning Curve for Native Engineers
React Native is built on a multitude of technologies. TypeScript is transpiled into JavaScript with Babel, then served by Metro (a relative to Webpack). The compiled JavaScript interacts with React Native APIs that communicate “over the bridge” to Objective-C or Java. React Native also provides global variables to polyfill functionality one would expect to find in a modern browser context, like fetch or FormData. Most of the application code is written with React, using TSX to mimic the ergonomics of HTML and CSS-like props to style elements. Engineers may come across tutorials featuring class-based components integrating with Redux, but the community is migrating to functional components, hooks, and context. Coding styles and conventions are enforced by TSLint/ESLint, then prettified by Prettier. Jest is the unit test runner, and we rely on Detox for E2E tests, possibly adding Enzyme in the future. Engineers spend most of their time in VSCode, a terminal shell, and their debugger of choice (e.g. Chrome dev tools, Reactotron).
Web engineers have probably had at least some exposure to most of the technologies and concepts mentioned in the previous paragraph, which is a big part of why the React Native learning curve is relatively low for them. Native engineers, on the other hand, may not be familiar with many of those terms, making the barrier to entry steeper. They’re not just learning a new language. They’re learning a new meta-language that transpiles into a new language using new build tools, a new library (React) that embraces new paradigms, a new framework (React Native), and a new ecosystem, all emerging from the complex and quirky evolution of JavaScript development over the past decade.
Another factor that makes the transition to React Native challenging for native engineers is the modular nature of the landscape. With native development, engineers spend their time in a powerful IDE (XCode, Android Studio) that does most of the heavy lifting in regards to managing the local environment. In contrast, React Native development often requires engineers to be more hands-on — installing dependencies and starting servers from the command-line, setting up build and release scripts, and configuring and connecting to a third-party debugger.
Finally, where mobile engineering has centralized authorities (Apple, Google) who maintain many of the foundational tools and define best practices for the platform, the React Native ecosystem is much more decentralized. While decentralization certainly comes with its benefits, it can create a great deal of confusion for newcomers. Often there is no single source of truth to rely on, and engineers may need to sift through several resources (e.g. Github documentation, Medium posts, StackOverflow threads, source code) to find what they’re looking for. In the process, they may encounter information that is conflicting and/or outdated, as the JavaScript ecosystem tends to evolve rapidly.
Possible Future Improvements
- Invest in custom tooling to improve the local development experience for native engineers.
- Have each native engineer spend a significant portion of their time pairing with one or more web engineers for the first quarter working with React Native.
- Maintain a library for commonly referenced React Native documentation, written with native engineers in mind as the primary audience. Materials would include up-to-date best practices for developing React Native apps at Coinbase, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, etc.
- The React Native team is also continually working to update their documentation to be more friendly to engineers across platforms.
Native Interoperability
Sometimes an app may need to access a platform API for which React Native doesn’t have a corresponding module yet. Or a particular feature might benefit from a performance boost that can only be achieved through native code. For scenarios like these, React Native offers native modules, which allow JavaScript to delegate tasks to custom native code.
When developing the Sign Up screens we didn’t encounter any performance issues that couldn’t be addressed purely with JavaScript. We did, however, need to write our date input using a custom native module, as we wanted to present the UIDatePicker that iOS users are accustomed to. We successfully implemented the component, but the developer experience was less than ideal:
- While native modules can be written in Swift and Kotlin, React Native only supports Objective-C and Java by default. Additionally, native modules must be exported using a set of macros that come with React Native. Between the Objective-C (We didn’t prioritize supporting Swift.) and the macros, writing code for a native module can feel a little awkward/clumsy.
- The core React Native components (e.g. TextInput) are not easily extendable through native code. If a component needs to behave similarly to a core component, but also requires custom native code, engineers may need to re-implement functionality that typically comes for free with core components. An example of this is triggering focus and blur callbacks for our custom native input components.
- Changes to custom native modules require a rebuild, the same as it would for a native app. As a consequence, engineers working on native code are forced to go back to a less productive environment without things like Fast Refresh.
- Data sent over the javascript-to-native bridge is not typesafe, which means that types need to be maintained on both the native and the TypeScript side.
Possible Future Improvements
- Add Swift and Kotlin support for native modules.
- If we find ourselves dealing with the same category of problem (e.g. focusing and blurring inputs that rely on custom native modules) more than once, consider investing in a lightweight framework to standardize and abstract the common behavior or upstream the changes into React Native.
- Maintain a sandbox environment to improve build times when writing native modules.
- Describe native APIs with JSON and use a tool like quicktype to generate types for TypeScript, Swift, and Kotlin, making it easy to keep JavaScript and native types synchronized.
- Coming React Native features like CodeGen will greatly change how Native Modules work and should solve a lot of these problems.
Platform Differences
While the majority of TypeScript code works on both platforms out of the box, there are some behavioral/styling inconsistencies between foundational UI components on iOS vs Android. Many of these differences are acknowledged in the React Native documentation, but could easily be overlooked if engineers aren’t diligent about testing on both platforms. React Native provides two convenient options to implement platform-specific behavior when it is necessary (the Platform module and platform-specific file extensions), but this introduces branching logic between platforms.
Possible Future Improvements
- Ensure that each React Native team at Coinbase has at least one native engineer from each platform (iOS, Android). These individuals will likely have better intuitions than web engineers when it comes to the expected behaviors and nuances of platform-specific native components.
- Maintain a thorough integration/E2E test suite that must pass for both iOS and Android simulators before any code can be committed to master. This should help protect against platform-specific defects that may have been missed in development.
- Require Pull Requests to include screenshots and/or gifs of new features working on iOS and Android, to normalize and enforce manual testing on both platforms.
- Introduce an automated visual testing framework to prevent unintended UI changes.
Debugging
One surprising discovery was that React Native debuggers do not necessarily evaluate JavaScript in the same engine as the simulator / device. With iOS devices, React Native runs on JavaScriptCore, and with Android devices, React Native can run on Hermes. However, when debugging is enabled, JavaScript execution is delegated to the debugger. So when debugging with Chrome dev tools, the Javascript is being evaluated by the V8 engine in the web context, not JavaScriptCore or Hermes in the native context.
In theory, these engines should all behave the same, as they’re all following the ECMAScript Language Specification. However, on two occasions, we were haunted by bugs that seemed to appear at random, then reliably work the moment we tried to examine the behaviors more closely. After a great deal of head-scratching in both cases, we realized that the bug was only present when debugging was disabled. The root cause of the issues had to do with the fact that global variables (specifically the fetch function and the Date object) had slightly different behaviors depending on which engine was running the code. Other teams have also cited different performance characteristics depending on whether debug was enabled (see “message actions” section).
It should be noted that the overwhelming majority of JavaScript behaves identically, regardless of whether debug is enabled. Furthermore, now that we’re aware of the potential pitfalls of debug mode, we expect any future issues to be easier to identify.
Possible Future Improvements
- Encourage new engineers to rely primarily on debuggers like Reactotron or Safari developer tools (which evaluate JavaScript using the simulator/device’s engine) and only resort to Chrome when one of its unique features is valuable.
- Encourage new engineers to use whatever debuggers they prefer, but be very explicit in communicating engine-related pitfalls, so they have a better chance of identifying this category of problem if they encounter it.
- Maintain a thorough integration/E2E test suite that must pass for both iOS and Android simulators before any code can be committed to master. This should help ensure that bugs aren’t masked by discrepancies between the engines of the simulator/device and a debugger.
Moving Forward
Overall, our team had a markedly positive experience with React Native. Component reusability, Fast Refresh, and ease of web engineer onboarding have all contributed meaningfully to the velocity of the project. As the team moves quickly, TypeScript and unit + E2E test suites should help ensure that it also moves safely. It is also worth noting that we did not encounter any performance issues that couldn’t be solved with JavaScript alone.
We are excited to continue our investments in React Native, with a particular internal focus on the following:
Developer Experience
While some aspects of working with React Native could be described as delightful, the developer experience is not without its quirks and may feel very hands-on at times, particularly for engineers who don’t come from a web background. For example, working with a React Native app requires installing and configuring several system-level dependencies (e.g. Homebrew, Node, Yarn, Ruby, Bundler, XCode, XCode Commandline Tools, XCodeGen, OpenJDK, Android Studio, Watchman, React Native CLI, TypeScript), synchronizing NPM packages (Javascript and native), synchronizing assets (e.g. fonts), managing a local Metro server with simulators/emulators, and connecting to a standalone debugger.
Education and Onboarding
React Native is a powerful technology that web engineers will be able to go far with. But unlocking its full potential requires a deep understanding of iOS and Android platforms, which can only be acquired through years of mobile experience. That is to say, for React Native to be truly successful at Coinbase, we need the help of our native engineers.
As mentioned previously, the learning curve for native engineers will be steep; in addition to React Native, they’ll also need to become familiar with several layers of technologies from the web ecosystem. If you are considering this on your team, we recommend you do everything you can to setup your engineers for success. This might include creating content that will help them navigate the landscape (e.g. tutorials, clearly defined best practices, troubleshooting guides), regularly scheduling pairing sessions with web engineers, and/or incorporating guard rails and tooling into our codebases sooner rather than later.
If you’re interested in technical challenges like this, please check out our open roles and apply for a position.
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.
Onboarding thousands of users with React Native 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 February 27, 2020Kyber Network (KNC) is now available on Coinbase
Starting today, Coinbase supports Kyber Network (KNC) at Coinbase.com and in the Coinbase Android and iOS apps. Coinbase customers can now buy, sell, convert, send, receive, or store KNC. KNC will be available for customers in all Coinbase-supported regions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom.
Kyber Network (KNC)
KNC is an Ethereum token used for paying fees on the Kyber Network, a protocol that aims to make swapping digital assets and cryptocurrencies simple and efficient. The Kyber protocol aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in any decentralized application.
One of the most common requests we hear from customers is to be able to buy and sell more cryptocurrencies on Coinbase. Per the terms of our listing process, we anticipate supporting more assets that meet our standards over time. We are also investing in new tools to help people understand and explore cryptocurrencies. We launched informational asset pages (see KNC 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 KNC today.
Kyber Network (KNC) 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 February 26, 2020Reliable fee-less Bitcoin transactions in Custody with Child-Pays-for-Parent
By Andrei Anisimov, Engineering Manager, Coinbase Custody
Being an engineer at Coinbase Custody means solving challenging problems at the intersection of security, reliability, and user experience. Coinbase’s security-first culture mandates that all trade-offs be made in favor of security. This approach is taken to the next level at Custody. After all, security is the main reason why large institutions and high net worth individuals trust Custody to hold on their behalf billions of dollars worth of crypto assets.
While security dominates all Custody technical decisions, customers experience our product day-to-day primarily through the lense of reliability and convenience. Our users frequently perform high-value, time-sensitive withdrawals and expect transactions to be confirmed on the blockchain without delays and have clean predictable amounts arriving at the destination (and with no fees deducted from the amount).
Fortunately, Bitcoin’s advanced technique called Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP) allows us to satisfy all of the above requirements: zero-fee transactions with reliable confirmation times, all while keeping the fundamental property of secure Cold Storage — using each private key strictly once.
Bitcoin fees and Cold Storage
Each transaction submitted to the Bitcoin network includes a fee paid to miners for processing this transaction and including it into a block. A block is produced every 10 minutes on average. When the size of all pending transactions exceeds the maximum block size limit of 1MB miners prioritize transactions with higher fees for inclusion while kicking low-fee transactions down the next block. Such a process can repeat multiple times, causing transaction to become stuck indefinitely until the network congestion clears up.
If you transacted Bitcoin in 2017–2018 you may remember multi-hour and sometimes multi-day delays during peaks of price volatility and other important market events. During those times it was not uncommon for transactions to pay up to 100x regular fees in order to be confirmed without delays. The chart below shows how volatile Bitcoin fees can be.
Historical transaction fee distribution (credit: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,all) At Coinbase Custody we recognize this obstacle and continuously innovate to give our customers an edge when they need it the most. One obvious solution is to calculate transaction fees immediately before broadcasting it to the Bitcoin network — knowing the current network conditions enables us to predict an optimal fee. Unfortunately, Cold Storage security requirements make it difficult to estimate the fee right before the broadcast.
Cold Storage challenge
The Cold Storage security model requires that complete transaction payload (including amounts and destinations) is fully known beforehand, guarding against any changes to the payload after the key restore procedure is initiated. On the flip side, since the transaction fee is encoded in the payload, it means that the fee must be calculated long before the transaction is broadcast. If during that time gap the network suddenly becomes congested, the calculated fee may become inadequate for the transaction to be confirmed in a timely manner.
Child-Pays-For-Parent to the rescue
One interesting property of Bitcoin’s UTXO model is that transactions can be chained together creating a “bundle” that miners evaluate as a whole with respect to the fees. For example, if one (child) transaction spends an output of another (parent) transaction, the child transaction can pay fees for both — miners have no choice but to include the parent transaction if they want to collect the excess fees from the child transaction. This approach is commonly known as Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP).
The Coinbase Consumer platform has been successfully using CPFP to accelerate withdrawals for quite some time and you can learn more about it in the blog post. However, Custody’s unique challenges forced us to rethink the approach and come up with a different design.
In Custody we use CPFP to shift the fee estimation to immediately before the broadcast. In addition, we use a special Gas Station service to cover the transaction fees. Here’s how it works step-by-step:
- When a withdrawal from a cold address is initiated we do an initial fee estimate and use the Gas Station service to send 10x estimated fees to that address.
- When constructing the withdrawal (parent) transaction in addition to the destination and change outputs we add an output that moves the pre-gassed amount (10x the fees) to a special “fee” address (this address is generated for each withdrawal and is used only once). Let’s call this output a “CPFP link”.
- Once the main transaction is signed at the end of the key restore ceremony and right before the broadcast, the fees get re-estimated again based on the current network conditions.
- The fee address generates a child transaction spending the CPFP-link output, paying the fees for both transactions and sending the remainder of the pre-gassed amount back to the Gas Station.
Example
Let’s work through an example to better understand the mechanics of the solution. Note that some minor details are omitted for simplicity. Let’s say we have a customer who has a balance of 15 BTC and they would like to withdraw 12 BTC from their Custody account into an external Bitcoin address. Here are the steps that will happen (note that ‘satoshi’ or ‘sat’ is the smallest unit in Bitcoin and equals to 0.00000001 BTC):
- Custody estimates the fee to complete this transaction to be 10,000 sat.
- Gas Station sends 10x that amount or 100,000 sat to the cold address (the address which holds the funds to be withdrawn).
- Custody generates the withdrawal transaction with two main outputs: 12 BTC goes to the destination address, 3 BTC “change” is returned to Cold Storage.
- We add a third “CPFP-link” output that moves the 100,000 sat to a newly generated fee address — this amount will later be used to pay the fee.
- The “key restore” ceremony commences. The result of it is a signed transaction payload ready to be broadcasted to the network.
- Right before the broadcast we estimate the fee again. As it turns out, the network suddenly became congested and now the fees are 2x what we initially estimated — 20,000 sat instead of the original 10,000 sat.
- We create a child transaction that spends the “CPFP link” output, pays 20,000 sat fee and moves the remaining 80,000 sat back to the Gas Station.
- We broadcast both transactions to the network.
Note that the destination address receives the clean 12 BTC amount. From the user perspective neither fees nor child transaction exist s— they are abstracted away and work behind the scenes to enable reliable zero-fee Bitcoin withdrawals.
Conclusion
This is just one example of interesting technical problems that Coinbase Custody engineers have an opportunity to work on. If you’re interested in joining the Coinbase Custody team, check out open roles here.
This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Reliable fee-less Bitcoin transactions in Custody with Child-Pays-for-Parent 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 February 25, 2020Send crypto more easily with Coinbase Wallet
by Sid Coelho-Prabhu, Product Lead for Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase Commerce
Starting today, Coinbase Wallet users can send crypto using short human-friendly addresses instead of traditional long addresses.
We’re excited to launch support for sending to Coinbase Wallet usernames like @walletfan, and Ethereum Name Service (ENS) addresses like walletfan.eth. Also, we’ve made it much easier to send crypto back to your linked Coinbase account with just a few taps.
No more long hexadecimal addresses
Wallet users often tell us how cumbersome it is to deal with long and nonsensical crypto addresses like 0x89136a83664fa0673930be34463e444260775dc or 3GVBSgLLLjAoNRKxw5hm7kANN2P2mEQJy . They also tell us how stressful it is to send money with the fear of having copied and pasted addresses incorrectly.
Human readable addresses help fix these problems. There are now services that let you associate a short human readable name with your crypto addresses. We’re pleased to integrate them into the Coinbase Wallet experience.
We believe these improvements will make cryptocurrency much easier to use and help drive adoption with a more mainstream audience. Users can now easily send money to friends and business partners like they do with traditional payment apps, albeit globally and in crypto.
Sending to Wallet usernames
Every Coinbase Wallet user has a username (like @walletfan). You can now easily send to other Wallet users with just their username instead of their full-length crypto address.
Just ask a friend for their Wallet username and type it in to send them crypto.
You can send all the currencies supported by Wallet today, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, XRP, Stellar Lumens, Dogecoin, and all ERC20 tokens (including USDC and DAI).
We value your privacy. If you prefer to keep your username private, we’ve added a convenient privacy toggle to the settings menu in the Wallet app.
Sending to Ethereum Name Service
We’re also integrating the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), which means you can now send crypto to .eth addresses. ENS supports all the currencies currently supported by Coinbase Wallet. Optionally, you can purchase your own .eth address by visiting the ENS website in Wallet’s dapp browser.
Sending to Coinbase
Last year, we launched an integration between the main Coinbase app and the Wallet app. This feature lets users easily link their Coinbase account to the Wallet app, and transfer funds to Wallet. Now, we’re introducing an easy way to send that crypto back to Coinbase from your Wallet, for storage, trading or cashing out to your bank.
Whether you prefer to store your crypto with Coinbase, store it yourself with Wallet, or a little bit of both, we make it easy to manage your entire crypto portfolio.
About Coinbase Wallet
The Coinbase Wallet app is Coinbase’s user-controlled cryptocurrency wallet. With Coinbase.com, you can buy crypto and Coinbase stores it (along with your private keys) for you; with Coinbase Wallet, you store your own crypto (safeguarded by a private key that only you know). Coinbase Wallet also offers a DApp browser. To learn more, visit our website.
We hope you enjoy using Coinbase Wallet. Your feedback helps us make Wallet better for everyone. You can reach us at wallet.support@coinbase.com. Please reach out with feedback or if you ever need some troubleshooting.
This website may contain links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase and are for illustration purposes only. Actual product may vary, including the dapps available and integrated with Coinbase Wallet.
Send crypto more easily with 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 February 21, 2020Things You Need to Know about the Bitcoin Halving, Ethereum’s Competitors Nearing Launch, and…
Things You Need to Know about the Bitcoin Halving and Ethereum’s Competitors Nearing Launch
Coinbase Around the Block sheds light on key issues in the crypto space. In this edition, we reveal key takeaways from the upcoming Bitcoin halving as well as Ethereum’s newest competition.
A Lead Up to the 3rd Bitcoin Halving
To date, Bitcoin has undergone two halvings (2012 and 2016), and we are quickly approaching the third.
For background, Bitcoin pioneered a deflationary economic model by setting an upper limit of 21 million bitcoins. In order to spur adoption, issuance was initially set at 50 BTC per block (every 10 minutes), and set to decay in half every four years as the network presumably grows more valuable. This event is now colloquially dubbed the halving.
Today, 18M Bitcoin have already been mined (86% of the final supply), with 12.5 new BTC (~$125K) issued every block. This will drop in May 2020 to 6.25 BTC (~$63K).
In inflationary terms, this moves Bitcoin from ~3.6% annual inflation to 1.7%, less than USD’s target inflation (2%) and roughly on par with Gold, potentially strengthening the narrative of Bitcoin as digital gold — a new kind of store of value.
Graph from BashCo.github.io Following simple supply and demand analysis, each halving decreases supply, and is commonly believed to be a driver for increased price. But what has happened in past halvings, and what can we learn?
BTC’s Momentum After Past Halvings
Bitcoin’s 1st halving occurred in early 2012, when the Bitcoin ecosystem was small, fragile, and volatile.
Following a long sideways market in 2012, the 1st halving itself was anticlimactic but was followed a few months later by a significant bull market. Smashing new all time highs and setting Bitcoin up for an explosive end to 2013, crossing $1300.
Fast forward 4 years, once again Bitcoin was in a long sideways market after falling from the $1300 peak in 2013. The halving itself was again nondescript, but bitcoin began to build strong momentum ~6 months later leading to the unprecedented 2017 run.
3rd Halving on the Horizon
Following the first two halvings, we note that most of the exponential growth occured after the halving. In fact, in each circumstance the halving itself was more of a non-event and any possible impact took ~3–6 months to appear.
Today, for a 3rd time we are in the midst of a long sideways market leading into the halving (although 2019 did see a mini run in the middle, but has since tapered off).
But notably different from past halvings, the crypto ecosystem has significantly matured. Crypto services have made it simple to buy, hold, and use Bitcoin, giving easy access to anyone who wants exposure. On the other hand, it’s also much easier to bet against Bitcoin and go short (via margin, futures, and derivatives). This was difficult in 2016, and completely absent in 2012.
Compared to 2016, crypto has also gained widespread notoriety. Most people have at least heard of bitcoin, and a number of institutions have (at minimum) developed an internal perspective on this asset class.
So is the halving priced in? There are generally two schools of thought:
- Yes. The halving is a byproduct of Bitcoin’s public and well-known economic model. All public information is priced-in to efficient markets, and this is no different.
- No. The halving is a narrative more than anything else, and may influence demand more than supply by driving increased awareness and adoption.
Key Takeaways for the upcoming BTC Halving
Studying prior Bitcoin halvings is a fascinating insight into market behavior and the evolution of Bitcoin as a new asset class. What will happen during and after the next halving? Anyone predicting the future is ultimately guessing, so we’ll have to wait and see. At minimum, the coming halving should produce a strong current of Bitcoin press, opinions, and theories.
Overview on Ethereum Competitors Nearing Launch
Throughout 2015–2017, several projects raised funds to develop general purpose smart-contract blockchain platforms, owing to 1) perceived market demand; 2) technical differentiators they might develop; and 3) expected challenges Ethereum might encounter.
It quickly became apparent that building novel smart-contract platforms is exceedingly complex, and nearly all platforms experienced significant delays (including ETH 2.0). Today, some of the most anticipated platforms are finally on the cusp of deployment.
Here’s an overview of some upcoming projects:
DFINITY
DFINITY aims to build a decentralized “Internet Computer,” where they would enable the public Internet to natively host backend software, transforming it into a global compute platform. Internet services would then be able to install their code directly on the public internet and dispense with all servers, cloud services, and centralized databases.
There are many implications to this idea, notably revolving around decentralizing the web and enabling open innovation, but also creating a path to autonomous software such as open versions of Facebook or LinkedIn. As a side-effect, it may also carry potentially improved security models and remove IT complexities and costs, among other things. If successful, this would be a powerful paradigm shift in how the internet operates.
To accomplish this, DFINITY has assembled a strong team of technologists and published some breakthroughs in consensus mechanisms to enable larger throughput (Threshold Relay).
Polkadot
Polkadot targets building an interoperability network, aiming to enable blockchain projects to:
- Trustlessly transfer assets between different chains;
- Enable cross-chain smart contracts that can interact with each other; and
- Provide a framework to quickly spin up application-specific chains that can be used by other blockchains.
Interoperability is a key building block for the crypto ecosystem. By way of example, it could enable crypto-kitties to create a specific blockchain with massive throughput (so you can breed those kittens as fast as you want), but your crypto-kitties could be accessed by Ethereum, and your platform could use ETH, Dai, or any other ERC-20 token (or possibly ETH infrastructure) natively.
The early days of web servers may be a helpful analogy. Back then, a single server hosted several web pages. If any page exploded in popularity, it slammed the whole server and took down all other web pages with it. The internet evolved to segregated, application-specific servers enabling each web page to scale as needed, without impacting anyone else. Replace web pages with blockchains, and this is just one aspect of what interoperability and application specific chains might do for crypto.
Polkadot is led by Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum) via Parity. Their approach is conceptually similar to Cosmos, but differentiated in how their interoperability network handles security.
NEAR Protocol
NEAR is similar in vision to Ethereum 2.0: A proof-of-stake, sharded blockchain with smart contract functionality, but with a twist in consensus design that better protects composability — or the ability for smart contracts to seamlessly interact with each other across shards. Coinbase Ventures is an investor in NEAR.
The NEAR team, a collection of ICPC medalists, believe targeting dapp developers is critical to long-term traction and are emphasizing the developer experience. Their goal is to launch a truly scalable chain with seamless developer tooling and with a built-in ETH → NEAR bridge so end-users can still use ETH tokens (and possibly ETH infrastructure), which would lower barriers to adoption.
In essence, NEAR is similar to ETH 2.0 but built on a new chain and new environment, thus forfeiting some of the significant network effects ETH has acquired. NEAR is planning a launch in Q2 this year.
Takeaways
Each ETH competitor also faces an uphill climb competing against the strong network effects Ethereum has accrued around infrastructure, tooling, distribution, and mindshare.
In the end, each new protocol’s launch is simply the beginning of a much longer journey. And in the long run, these networks could add new functionality to the wider crypto protocol layer, broadening the crypto design space and increasing the potential for impactful dapps.
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.
Unless otherwise noted, all images provided herein are by Coinbase.
Things You Need to Know about the Bitcoin Halving, Ethereum’s Competitors Nearing Launch, and… 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 February 19, 2020Kyber Network (KNC) is launching on Coinbase Pro
On Tuesday, February 25, KNC began trading on Coinbase Pro. Support for KNC is available in all Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom. Per previous launches, transfers opened during business hours, Pacific Standard Time.
On Tuesday, February 25, KNC began trading on Coinbase Pro. Per previous launches, transfers opened during business hours, Pacific Standard Time.
Once sufficient supply of KNC is established on the platform, trading on the KNC/USD, and KNC/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 KNC will be immediately available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom.
KNC is an Ethereum token used for paying fees on the Kyber Network, a protocol that aims to make swapping digital assets and cryptocurrencies simple and efficient. The Kyber protocol aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in any decentralized application.
Please note that KNC is not yet available on Coinbase.com or via our consumer mobile apps. We will make a separate announcement if and when this support is added.
The Stages of the KNC Launch
There will be four stages to the launch as outlined below. We will follow each of these stages independently for each new order book. If at any point one of the new order books does not meet our assessment for a healthy and orderly market, we may keep the book in one state for a longer period of time or suspend trading as per our Trading Rules.
We will send tweets from our Coinbase Pro Twitter account as each order book moves through the following phases:
- Transfer-only. Starting on Monday, February 24, customers will be able to transfer KNC 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 24 hours. We will communicate the exact timing for this phase via Twitter closer to the date.
- Post-only. In the second stage, customers can post limit orders but there will be no matches (completed orders). Order books will be in post-only mode for a minimum of one minute.
- Limit-only. In the third stage, limit orders will start matching but customers are unable to submit market orders. Order books will be in limit-only mode for a minimum of ten minutes.
- Full trading. In the final stage, full trading services will be available, including limit, market, and stop orders.
One of the most common requests we receive from customers is to be able to trade more assets on our platform. Per the terms of our listing process, we anticipate supporting more assets that meet our standards over time.
You can sign up for a Coinbase Pro account here to start trading. For more information on trading KNC on Coinbase Pro, visit our support page.
Kyber Network (KNC) 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 February 19, 2020Coinbase becomes a Visa Principal Member
Coinbase becomes a Visa principal member
Coinbase becomes the first pure-play cryptocurrency company to receive Visa membership.
Today we’re announcing that Coinbase has become the first pure-play crypto company to be approved as a Visa principal member. Visa membership will enable us to further improve the customer experience, making it easier to spend cryptocurrency in everyday situations.
Our journey with Visa began in 2019 with the launch of Coinbase Card in the UK, a Visa debit card that allows customers to spend their crypto as easily as the money in their bank account. Nine months later, Coinbase Card is available to customers in 29 markets who are able to spend 10 cryptocurrencies in millions of merchant locations.
From funding holidays abroad to trips on public transport, Coinbase Card customers are making their crypto work for them in everyday situations. Over half of customers who’ve signed up to Coinbase Card use it regularly, with its usage peaking in the UK, followed closely by Italy, Spain, and France.
Following the success of Coinbase Card, we are proud to be the first company in the crypto ecosystem to be granted Visa principal membership. This membership will enable us to offer more features for Coinbase Card customers; from additional services to support in more markets — all elements that will help to evolve and enrich the cryptocurrency payment experience.
Today’s announcement is another significant milestone in the mainstream adoption of crypto as a genuine utility. We will continue to build on this relationship with further initiatives which make interacting with crypto as seamless as possible for our customers.
Coinbase becomes a Visa Principal Member 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 February 13, 2020Coinbase Reports: Black Americans & Crypto
Black Americans surveyed by Coinbase are twice as likely to have been negatively impacted by the current financial system; are also more interested in learning about crypto.
At Coinbase, we believe diverse opinions, backgrounds, and experiences are essential to our mission of creating an open financial system for the world — one that’s more equitable and accessible. In time for Black History Month, we partnered with Qriously to ask 5,126 people ages 18+ in the US and UK about their experiences with the current financial system, their thoughts on how technology will impact the world, and their interest in crypto. We also asked prominent People of Color involved in crypto how it can help solve the problems of our current financial system and the importance for everyone to get a seat at the table.
Key findings from Coinbase research
- Twice as many Black Americans have been negatively impacted by the current financial system as White Americans
- College-educated Black Americans are nearly twice as interested as college-educated White Americans in learning more about crypto
- The majority of Black Americans believe tech will have a positive impact on society
- 1 in 3 Black Americans believe all ethnicities/races have equal access to the financial system
- Black Americans lead the charge when it comes to interest in understanding crypto
In our survey, 48 percent of Black Americans indicated they have been negatively impacted by the current financial system (banking, currencies, stock markets, lending/borrowing, etc.) because of their race or gender. 24 percent of White Americans responded similarly.
When broken down by age, 48 percent of 18–34 year olds and 52 percent of 55+ year olds have been negatively impacted, indicating that bias in the financial system hasn’t changed much over time.
Previous studies — and historical facts — back up these findings. According to a 2014 report from Zillow, Black Americans make up only 3 percent of conventional mortgage applications, the lowest rate of any racial group. But Black Americans also face the highest denial rate, about 25 percent versus only 10 percent for White American applicants.¹
How can crypto correct the inequity of our financial system? “Crypto incentivizes people to operate together who normally wouldn’t, says Steven McKie, Founder and CEO of Amentum, a cryptocurrency investment firm. “Cultural groups, whether they’re religious or ethnic, have positive benefits to the participants of those groups. The core reason there’s a benefit is because it’s easy to create social trust with things that are familiar.
Now the cool thing about crypto is it’s trustless technology. The system is neutral. Crypto moves us away from an environment where we need to assume trust in a group before we can do business. With crypto, there’s redundant systems that prevent someone from screwing you over. If you’re a minority or part of an underrepresented group, and you’re used to only trusting one type of ethnic group or social group, now you can expand your window.”
Vernon Johnson, Co-founder of Yup, a decentralized social capital protocol, and former VP of Columbia University’s blockchain organization, agrees. “Many cryptocurrency transactions are pseudonymous and don’t require the disclosure of your real world identity, which may ease some of the apprehensions about racial discrimination in Finance 1.0,” says Vernon. “It becomes much harder to perceive racial identity in a world where people’s real identities are obfuscated. Crypto allows people to be evaluated solely on their digital reputation and transaction history versus more traditional financial options that require in-person meetings or disclosure of real world identity documents.
In general, Black Americans have a more optimistic view of technology with 58 percent agreeing that technological innovation, in general, has a positive impact on society. Black Americans are also more likely to agree that technological innovation can solve many of the world’s problems, with 51 percent agreeing to the statement versus only 39 percent of White Americans, and a majority also believe that tech will impact the financial system positively in the next 10 years.
Technology has always been a key part of our financial system. Money, like other useful technologies, has gone through many upgrades over the years. From trading shells and metal coins to tapping apps and trading stocks, money has evolved from facilitating transactions between neighbors to connecting billions of people worldwide. However, since our traditional system of money depends on geographic location, financial institutions, and government control, it has limitations that can greatly affect access.
Today, it’s estimated that more than 2.5 billion people have smartphones, with that number growing in both advanced economies and emerging economies.² And more than a million people have been accessing the internet for the first time each day since January 2018.³
However, there are still 1.7 billion people globally who don’t have access to a financial account.⁴ “Several reasons include a lack of a reliable government issued identity and high fees,” says Vernon. “Additionally, many national currencies are volatile and aren’t reliable stores of value. A disproportionate number of People of Color face these problems, and crypto seeks to use open market incentives to level the playing field. On the upside, many of the unbanked have access to a smartphone and the internet, which allows them to plug into cryptocurrency-based financial services.”
Carmelle Cadet, Founder and CEO of EMTECH, a technology and services company that’s helping Central Banks in emerging markets build modern financial systems with blockchain technology, agrees that crypto is ushering in a new generation of innovation. “At the core of it all, there’s a lot of inefficiency in the legacy systems. They’re breaking because they weren’t built for how globally connected we now are,” says Carmelle. “So when it comes to improving the financial markets, building a new infrastructure is needed at this point.”
Black Americans in our survey were closely split in their belief of whether all ethnicities/races have equal access to the current financial system, with 35 percent agreeing to the statement, 37 percent disagreeing, and 28 percent answering neutral. When asked at what pace are all ethnicities/races getting equal access, only 22 percent answered faster than expected.
One factor that affects access to the financial system is having government-issued photo identification, which is needed to open a bank account in the US. According to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, as many as 11 percent of US citizens — and as many as 25 percent of African American citizens — don’t have government-issued photo ID.⁵
“The first thing I would want crypto to fix would be identity,” says Robert Greenfield, Head of Social Impact at ConsenSys. “A digital identity has more of a major impact than you can even fathom. If you don’t have a driver’s license, you can’t even participate in humanitarian aid programs.”
“You could have a cryptographic type of token that a central bank could issue,” says Carmelle. “If you have a crypto token that is the legal tender, that is trusted and redeemable, it would help close the gap with people who don’t qualify or don’t fit into the typical banking system. With crypto, they could have a mechanism to access digital means of exchange. They have a digital way of storing their cash and they can have a cryptographic way of maintaining their identity. That’s what excites me about crypto. It fills a gap, it fulfills a need that commercial banks can’t.”
When it comes to understanding crypto, Black Americans show more interest than any other respondents with 70 percent being interested, compared to 42 percent of White Americans.
College-educated Black Americans are nearly twice as interested as their White American counterparts, with 75 percent interested in learning more versus 39 percent of their White American counterparts.
When broken down by age, 21 percent of Black Americans over the age of 55 are very interested in learning about crypto, compared to 6 percent of White Americans over the age of 55.
1 in 3 Black Americans also responded they would be even more interested in understanding crypto if someone explained how it could make access to the financial system more equal.
Steven believes learning about crypto and getting involved is a growing opportunity for People of Color. “There’s a lot of opportunities to find your tribe if you look for it. And crypto has matured enough to the point where you can peek your head in and a year from now, you will feel even more represented. So it’s a really safe opportunity,” said Steven. “Find your crowd, listen to the different discussions and find where in the conversation you feel like you belong. There’s such a wide array of different voices and personalities that you can listen to now, to form your perspective. Now is the time that you need to insert yourself into the community until you feel like you’re a part of the community. That’s how anyone joins any new community, they just kind of jump in.”
“In the last tech revolution, the emergence of the internet, there was very little representation for People of Color,” Vernon says. “And that trend has continued, as black and brown people are underrepresented at tech companies, have a harder time raising venture capital, and generally have fewer opportunities to enter tech. As a result, communities of color have had little ownership and stake in the wealth and innovation generated by the last tech revolution. Unfortunately, black people were beneficiaries as consumers and internet users, but few were core stakeholders in the companies and protocols that helped bring about such change. This time needs to be different. It’s important that underrepresented people of color play a role in helping shape Web 3.0 and partake in the new opportunities that will arise from it.”
“You have to take the first step,” Robert says. “If you don’t want to be an engineer, that’s fine. There’s still a lot of design problems that need to be solved. You don’t like design? Well, there’s still a lot of legal ambiguity that needs to be corrected. So I always tell people to try to find what your passion is first, and understand that there’s a place in the blockchain ecosystem that you could do really, really well.”
Diversity also directly correlates to a company’s bottomline, according to a study by the Boston Consulting Group. They surveyed more than 1,700 companies in 8 countries and found that companies that have more diverse management teams have 19 percent higher revenue due to better innovation and improved financial performance.⁶
“Working with different people, and not just of different ethnicities, but also from different regions as well, just makes for better leaders. And better leaders make for a less political environment, and a less political environment is more operationally efficient,” says Robert.
Many talented people of color often choose the “safe” option when it comes to job opportunities, says Vernon. “This leads to highly qualified people of color being funnelled into large established corporations instead of taking risks. As a result, their impact is capped and constrained by the glass ceilings of corporate America. Entering crypto is a superior option because an individual’s impact is magnified significantly. They’ll be at the cutting-edge, helping build the infrastructure for the decentralized internet. I believe this will be one of the most transformative events of the next decade.”
Carmelle believes Black Americans should learn about crypto because it’s a way to “hedge the system.”
“When we look at 2008, whether you were in a large economy or a developing economy, we were all on pins and needles whether our money was going to be in the bank, whether we were safe. You have a lot of people who lost their jobs. Everything is so intertwined into our sole financial system,” says Carmelle. “We need an alternative in case it’s all going to hell tomorrow. Crypto is your shot to have a seat at the table, to build something that works for you, for your people. You can’t turn the other way, otherwise you’re going to miss this innovation cycle and you’re going to have someone else telling you how you store your money and how much you pay to move it.”
Help us build the next financial system: https://www.coinbase.com/careers
Earn crypto just for learning about it: https://www.coinbase.com/earn
Footnotes
3. https://wearesocial.com/blog/2019/01/digital-2019-global-internet-use-accelerates
5.https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf
6. https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation.aspx
Methodology: To assess People of Color’s sentiments about inclusion and the financial system, Coinbase commissioned a study conducted by Qriously of 5,126 people ages 18+ in the US and UK during January 2020. The survey asked questions about their thoughts on money, technology, and the financial system to derive the statistics cited in this post.
This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.
All images provided herein are by Coinbase unless otherwise indicated.
Coinbase Reports: Black Americans & 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 February 12, 2020In another first, Coinbase Custody attains its SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports
These two certifications highlight the procedures and security we have in place to provide a world-class custodial platform.
Since its founding in 2012, Coinbase has prided itself on “building trust through compliance.” This ethos impacts everything we do and each service we provide. From being awarded one of the first New York Bitlicenses in 2017, to recently obtaining e-money licenses in the UK and Ireland, compliance is central to our mission of creating an open financial system for the world.
Coinbase Custody is proud to carry this torch. Being licensed as a New York Limited Purpose Trust Company under the NY Department of Financial Services’ supervision demonstrates to our clients that we are held to the same rigorous compliance, security and auditing standards as traditional financial services companies.
Today, we are excited to share the next phase of this journey. In 2019, Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC, engaged Grant Thornton LLP to conduct two System and Organization Controls (SOC) examinations. We recently completed the SOC 1 Type 2 (“SOC 1”) and SOC 2 Type 2 (“SOC 2”) examinations for the period of July 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019. As we move forward, we will continue to engage a third party to conduct regular SOC 1 and SOC 2 examinations.
We are proud to be the first crypto custodian to attain both of these prestigious reports.
For our clients, these reports highlight the procedures and security we have in place on our custodial platform. The SOC reports include a description of the Coinbase’s Custody Services Platform for processing our clients’ transactions and Grant Thornton LLP’s tests of our controls relating to our service commitments, system requirements, and control objectives.
Being the first crypto custodian to be issued both the SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 reports is yet another milestone demonstrating our commitment to being the world’s most trusted and compliant custodian of crypto assets. These reports build on our previous compliance milestones achieved independently of Grant Thornton LLP, such as our industry-leading, comprehensive insurance policies.
As we move forward, Coinbase remains committed to maintaining the same level of rigorous security and oversight standards that has established us as a true institutional-grade custodian.
Coinbase Custody is the world’s largest and fastest growing crypto custodian. If you’re interested in helping to build the utility phase of crypto, we’re hiring!
In another first, Coinbase Custody attains its SOC 1 and SOC 2 reports 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 February 12, 2020Margin trading is now available on Coinbase Pro
Starting today, Coinbase Pro customers in 23 U.S. states can access up to 3x leverage on USD-quoted books.
Today we’re excited to announce the availability of margin trading for eligible Coinbase Pro customers. Margin has been one of our most requested features, and today we’re delivering an experience that we’re confident our customers will find intuitive, yet highly sophisticated and functional.
Trading crypto on margin (or leverage) can amplify the impact of your trades by allowing you to borrow additional funds. If deployed as part of a responsible trading strategy, margin trading doesn’t just increase your position in a specific trade, but can also help diversify your portfolio, allowing you to hedge or arbitrage across multiple positions without depositing additional capital.
Over the next year we plan to expand access to the product to customers located in more regions. We will also be expanding the product to include more types of collateral assets.
Trade safely and effectively
Designed for advanced traders, margin trading provides access to trade on leverage on the deepest, and most trusted pool of crypto liquidity. No other crypto exchange has Coinbase’s track record of compliance, security, reliability and deep liquidity, meaning that traders can feel confident that they will be able to execute on even the most sophisticated portfolio strategies.
Eligibility and collateral requirements
Margin trading is available to both individual and institutional traders. For individuals to qualify for margin trading, they must live within one of the 23 states* where we currently offer the feature, have a valid Coinbase Pro account, and be active on Coinbase Pro, measured by recent trades, balances, and deposit and withdrawal activity**. We suggest keeping a balance on Coinbase Pro and trading regularly to become eligible.
For institutional customers to access margin trading, they must be based in one of the 43 states or 9 international countries where we currently offer margin for institutions.
If you don’t already have a Coinbase Pro account, you can sign up here. For more information on margin trading on Coinbase, please view our support page.
Margin trading is risky and may not be suitable for everyone. The value of digital assets may fluctuate and, as a result, you may lose more than your original investment. This posting and any other material provided by Coinbase regarding margin trading does not specifically address individual financial objectives or the particular needs of any specific person. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice. Coinbase is not responsible for any loss of funds or other damages caused as a result of margin trading on Coinbase Pro. Past performance of an asset should not be taken as an indication or guarantee of future performance.
- *States where margin trading is currently available: FL, TX, IL, NJ, VA, GA, AR, AK, OR, CT, NH, MA, NE, NC, OK, CO, KS, ME, SC, UT, WI, WY, WV
- **Eligibility requirements pertain to enabling margin trading on Coinbase Pro. Additional requirements may apply to engaging in margin trading activity including, but not limited to, having enough collateral assets in your Coinbase Pro Account.
Margin trading is now available 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.
