Your guide to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Web 3.0

When most people think of Coinbase, the decade-old publicly traded crypto company, product innovation might not be the first thing that comes to mind. At ETH Denver, however, Coinbase head of protocols Jesse Pollak says the company aims to change that.

“If you look at the history of Coinbase and crypto over the last 10 years, it’s been very merchant-centric,” Pollak said 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.

Last month, Coinbase – the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US – launched Base, an Ethereum layer-2 sandbox for decentralized applications. Joining Coinbase in the launch are several high-profile blockchain companies, including oracle network Chainlink, Ethereum block explorer Etherscan and DeFi protocol Aave.

In January, Coinbase added new features Coinbase walletincluding transaction previews, token approval notifications, a blocklist of flagged dApps, and a spam token manager that automatically hides malicious airdrops.

In April 2022, Coinbase launched a NFT marketplace which did not hit as hard as the company had hoped.

“The first version of the product didn’t work as well as we would have liked,” Pollak said. “But we’ve iterated quickly over the last year and I think we’re seeing a lot more signs of life and a lot more growth there.”

For Pollak, the experience with the NFT marketplace is an indication of the innovation culture at Coinbase: taking big bets on big projects like NFT, Base and USDC.

“We launched the NFT marketplace last year and the goal was basically to help people coming from the off-chain world to access NFTs, learn about them and participate in this emerging economy,” he said.

Along with ETH Denver, Coinbase announced the acquisition of One River Management, a digital asset management firm, which the cryptocurrency exchange plans to roll into its new Coinbase asset management business line. Pollak says this will help Coinbase bring in new clients as a registered investment advisor.

“That is our mission; that’s why we’re here,” Pollak said. “We are here to create useful applications that can be globally accessible that increase financial freedom and bring billions of people into a better way of life.”