Coinbase, the leading U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, has unveiled two innovative wallet solutions designed to streamline the process of onboarding new users into the world of cryptocurrency.
The newly introduced features, named the smart wallet and embedded wallets, are aimed at addressing common challenges associated with the cumbersome user experience of creating crypto wallets.
The smart wallet, integrated into the Coinbase Wallet SDK, offers developers a software toolkit to instantly create wallets within decentralized applications using a passkey. This approach eliminates the need for complex procedures such as seed phrases, providing users with a seamless onboarding experience. Built on top of Coinbase’s layer-2 network Base, the smart wallet utilizes the account abstraction blockchain technology, which offers users recovery options in case of key loss. Additionally, Coinbase will provide gas fee credits through its Account Abstraction Kit.
The Base team, in their blog post, outlined their goal for 2024 to make smart wallets the default option, addressing key security and usability challenges to enhance on-chain adoption.
The second offering, embedded wallets powered by “wallet as a service” (WaaS), enables companies to customize blockchain wallets for their customers. This feature allows developers to create white-labeled embedded wallets that simplify crypto complexities through familiar email and social login flows.
In a press release, Coinbase emphasized the importance of evolving wallets to facilitate the next generation of on-chain experiences and pave the way for mass adoption of blockchain technology.