Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is launching a smart wallet. The new Coinbase Wallet will offer users greater convenience through onboarding, eliminating gas fees and making recovery phrases unnecessary.
Smart wallets overcome complexity
The smart wallet will allow users to create a new wallet and onboard onto a blockchain without downloading a new app or receiving a new recovery phrase. Instead, the smart wallet will integrate with major apps and use Face ID, users’ Google Chrome profile, fingerprint ID or Yubikey to onboard through a passkey that will be stored on users’ devices.
The smart wallet will have self-custody and permit payments from the user’s Coinbase Wallet or Coinbase account. Developers will be able to choose to waive gas fees by sponsoring the transaction through a paymaster.
A companion web app will be the user’s primary platform and will offer asset and identity management, buying, sending, swapping, nonfungible tokens and transaction history. Coinbase promises “a fluid and intuitive experience” throughout those transactions.
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At the start, the smart wallet will support the Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain and Zora networks. The smart wallet will be free for both users and developers. Coinbase said in a post on its Canadian blog:
“This simplicity, combined with multi-chain support and integration with major applications, will make onboarding to the blockchain as effortless as signing into your favorite website.”
Current users will be able to use the new wallet “in the coming months” after it finalizes all migration tools.
Smart wallet technology is spreading
Smart wallet technology is not new. Loopring and Argent pioneered the technology in 2020. Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin embraced the idea the following year in his blog, touting the “social recovery” features that add security and eliminate recovery phrases.
The breakthrough technology for smart wallets on Ethereum, called “account abstraction,” debuted with the ERC-4337 standard in March 2023. Buterin reiterated those and other virtues of the smart wallet in a June 2023 blog post.
Coinbase began offering smart wallets to developers in March.
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