Coinbase seeks to attract 1 billion users to cryptocurrency with smart wallet launch

Coinbase, America’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, today unveiled its promised Smart Wallet. The product is said to be designed to reduce obstacles for new users looking to get started in the DeFi space.

“Smart Wallet allows users to create a secure, self-managed wallet in just seconds for free,” Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu, senior director of product management at Coinbase, wrote in a blog post announcing the launch. “It simplifies onboarding, reduces the number of transactions to sign, and allows you to use your Coinbase balance seamlessly.”

Coinbase first announced its smart wallet at ETHDenver in February.

Instead of traditional recovery phrases, apps, and extensions commonly used to access DeFi apps and services, smart wallets use industry-standard passkeys and accompanying web portals that connect to Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, and BNB. do. , Zora Network at launch.

Coinbase’s new wallet aims to solve problems with the typical DeFi user experience, especially when getting started.

“Until now, installing a separate wallet app and going on-chain using first-generation blockchains has been slow, expensive, and difficult,” Coelho-Prabhu wrote. Coinbase Smart Wallet allows users to create new wallets using Face ID, Google Chrome profile, Yubikey, fingerprint unlock feature, or FaceID.

Smart wallets also attempt to fix the fragmentation that occurs when users must manage balances in multiple wallets to fully utilize various cryptocurrency apps. Users can withdraw from their Coinbase account balance or self-managed wallet balance, facilitating transactions almost anywhere.

Coinbase is encouraging cryptocurrency developers to integrate Smart Wallet into their apps, offering up to $15,000 in gas credits through the Base Gasless campaign and other On-Chain Summer contests and incentives.

“Smart wallet integration is simple and requires only a few lines of code at most,” Coelho-Prabhu said, noting that the system is active and already supported by popular crypto code libraries.

Another notable feature of smart wallets is the possibility of gas-free transactions through “paymaster” sponsorship, where developers or other parties can cover user gas costs to provide products or services for free.

Coelho-Prabhu explained that this is all part of the company’s broader vision for a world where everyone uses cryptocurrency.

“Smart Wallet is a revolutionary step forward in our mission to bring more than 1 billion users on-chain,” he wrote.

The launch of Smart Wallet kicks off Coinbase’s annual “On-Chain Summer” rewards campaign.

Since March, with the Dencun hard fork and “proto danksharding” implementation, the company’s native layer 2 scaling network for Ethereum has experienced a surge in its total value. It also emerged as the most profitable L2 network, with on-chain revenue of over $6 million last month.

However, the popular US cryptocurrency exchange has faced scalability issues as Base’s popularity has grown in recent months, including several failed trades amid ongoing tensions with the SEC.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.