Building Coinbase Custody

Earlier this summer digital currency platform Coinbase launched Custody, their new service for financial institutions and hedge funds. We helped them design and build it.

Coinbase is a platform where people can buy, sell and store digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has, since its founding in 2012, been one of the world’s fastest-growing startups. They are currently responsible for more than $20 billion in crypto assets.

We have worked together with Coinbase for a few years as an external product development team working on new services outside of their core business. Previously we’ve worked together on building Coinbase Wallet, an open financial platform for the developing world.

Earlier this year we started collaborating on Custody, a digital asset custodian for institutional investors, operating with a minimum deposit of $10 million. By leveraging top-notch security with a great user experience the goal is to be the most trusted and simple-to-use custody service for digital currencies.

“Over 100 hedge funds have been created in the past year exclusively to trade digital currency. An even greater number of traditional institutional investors are starting to look at trading digital assets (including family offices, sovereign wealth funds, traditional hedge funds, and more). By some estimates there is $10B of institutional money waiting on the sidelines to invest in digital currency today.”

- Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase

We designed and built the service from end to end. As a team we contributed with product design, front-end and back-end development, including crypto implementations for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. We are currently working on adding support for ERC20 tokens. In addition, we built an administrative back-end for Coinbase employees to manage organisations and transactions.

With the platform’s ambition to target $10 billion in institutional funds, we have had a relentless focus on security from the start. U2F authentication with security keys is implemented throughout, and all private keys are kept in a separate cold storage.

We’re excited to continue working on this going forward. Check it out over at custody.coinbase.com