An executive says that the crypto exchange that is open to the public will continue to push the limits.
Most people don’t think of product innovation when they think of Coinbase, a public crypto company that has been around for a decade. Coinbase’s head of protocols, Jesse Pollak, said at ETH Denver that the company wants to change that.
“If we look at the history of Coinbase and crypto over the last 10 years, it’s been very trading-centric,” Pollak told Decrypt. “Our investment in Base is an investment in creating a platform that makes it easy for developers to build useful products on an on-chain platform, and then makes it easy for users to use those products through interfaces like Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet.”
Base, an Ethereum layer-2 sandbox for decentralized applications, was released by Coinbase last month. Several well-known blockchain companies are launching at the same time as Coinbase. These include the oracle network Chainlink, the Ethereum block explorer Etherscan, and the DeFi protocol Aave.
In January, Coinbase added new features to its Coinbase Wallet, such as transaction previews, token approval alerts, a blocklist of flagged dApps, and a spam token manager that automatically hides malicious airdrops.
In April 2022, Coinbase opened a market for NFTs, but it didn’t do as well as the company had hoped.
“The first version of the product didn’t work as well as well as we’d like to,” Pollak said. “But we’ve been iterating quickly on that over the last year, and I think we’re seeing a lot more signs of life and a lot more growth there.”
Pollak thinks that the way Coinbase handles big projects like NFTs, Base, and USDC, where big bets are placed, is a good example of how innovation works there.
“We launched the NFT marketplace last year and the goal was basically to help folks coming from the off-chain world access NFTs, learn about them, and participate in this economy that’s emerging,” he said.
At ETH Denver, Coinbase announced that it had bought One River Management, a company that manages digital assets. Coinbase plans to add One River Management to its new asset management business line. Pollak says that as a registered investment advisor, this will help Coinbase get more customers.
“That’s our mission; that’s why we’re here,” Pollak said. “We’re here to create useful applications that can be globally available that increase economic freedom and bring billions of people into a better way of living.”
