Coinbase launches its Own Smart Wallet to help bring 1 billion users On Chain
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase today officially launched its new "smart wallet" to help bring a billion users on-chain and improve the user experience for its clients.
Meet the next evolution of self-custodial wallets.
— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) June 5, 2024
Smart wallets are a revolutionary step forward in our mission to bring a billion people onchain. https://t.co/TQbOwQI5sc
According to the company's blog post announcing the launch, "Smart Wallets enable users to quickly and easily create a free, secure, self-custody wallet," stated Siddharth Coelho-Prabhu, Coinbase's senior director of product management. They make it easier to sign transactions, streamline the onboarding process, and allow you to use your Coinbase balances without any hassles.
Coinbase initially announced the new smart wallet back in February at EthDenver. The new wallets from Coinbase are designed to solve issues with the standard DeFi user experience, particularly with initial setup.
The unveiled smart wallets use industry-standard passwords and a companion web portal connecting to the Base, Optimism, Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, BNB, and Zora networks as of launch, in place of the traditional recovery phrases, extensions, and apps typically used to access DeFi apps and services.
Coelho-Prabhu stated, "Up until now, going on-chain has been expensive, slow, and hard, with different wallet app installs and first-generation blockchains." However, with the Coinbase Smart Wallet, users can use a Google Chrome profile, the fingerprint unlock feature, Face ID, a Google Chrome profile, or Yubikey to create a new wallet.
Additionally, smart wallets aim to address the fragmentation that arises from requiring users to manage balances between several wallets in order to fully utilize a variety of cryptocurrency apps. To enable transactions from anywhere, users will be able to access their self-custodial wallet balance or their Coinbase account balance.
Along with other On-Chain Summer competitions and incentives, the U.S.-based exchange is encouraging crypto developers to integrate its Smart Wallet into their apps by providing up to $15,000 in gas credits through a Base Gasless Campaign. Furthermore, Coelho-Prabhu stated that gasless transactions will also be possible. Smart Wallets also offer the option of gasless transactions via "Paymaster" sponsorships, which allow developers or other parties to cover the gas fees of users to provide a free product or service.
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