On Wednesday, Coinbase launched a new feature, dubbed "Coinbase Pay," that enables its clients to fund their Coinbase Wallets directly from a Chrome browser extension. According to its staff, Coinbase Pay intends to make it intuitive for anyone to participate in decentralized finance, or DeFi, swap tokens on decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, and purchase nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in just a few clicks. Specifically, they wrote:
"Before Coinbase Pay, users who wanted to add funds to their Coinbase Wallet from the browser extension needed to navigate to Coinbase.com, sign in to their account, copy-paste their wallet address, and manually transfer funds from their Coinbase account. The process was not only cumbersome, but also left the user vulnerable to user error."
With Coinbase Pay, one would simply need to select the currency to add to one's wallet on Chrome, specify the amount and confirm the transaction. "No more switching between apps, copy-pasting addresses and manually transferring funds," the staff at Coinbase wrote.
According to the company, users do not need a Coinbase.com account to use Coinbase Wallet. However, they would need to link their self-custody wallet to their Coinbase account before using Coinbase Pay as a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp service. Despite coming from a centralized exchange, private keys within the extension are stored by the user and not by Coinbase.
Last month, the Coinbase wallet enabled support for the Ledger hardware wallet. By the end of last year, the exchange had grown to store 12% of all crypto across more than 150 asset types. The company also has plans to launch its own NFT marketplace. At the time of publication, there are currently 3.86 million email addresses recorded on the Coinbase NFT waitlist.