Coinbase Allows Web 2.0 Developers to Enter the Web3 with Wallet API Launch

• Blockchain Council
• September 17, 2024

A new Web3 wallet has been launched that could change how a user interacts with Web2 applications and is a major update to the conventional wallet user experience. Coinbase, one of the top three largest crypto exchanges by trading volume, has announced a new product to ease developers who wish to offer a transition from Web2 to Web3 technologies to their users. The brand believes it should be easier to convert visitors to engaged users without asking them to shift from the platform.

Coinbase has a wallet-as-a-service (WaaS) model of business. Their service is a scalable set of wallet infrastructure application programming interfaces (API) that allows businesses and enterprises to develop and deploy on-chain wallets to their user base. These wallets offer customization to offer a more personalized and thoughtful user experience. This wallet service completely transformed the user experience with traditional wallets where a user had to leave the application.

The interface redirects the user to a separate application for transaction completion. Now with this new Wallet API, any company, business, or enterprise can allow a user to complete a transaction from their native application without having to leave the platform as it was done before.

Coinbase is also confident about the safety and security of this new innovative Web3 wallet integration API. The Vice President of Engineering at Coinbase, Will Robinson, said, “We built this product to be hard enough and suitable to even drive our institutional, retail businesses, and with this exposure as an API, a regular developer who may not be knowledgeable about crypto but is a web2 application developer [will be able] to integrate this capability into their app and let users directly onboard right where they are.”

Brands like Moonray, Floor, Tokenproof, and Thirdweb have announced using this new WaaS as a feature to allow users to access Web3 experiences without additional charges. Will said, “We should allow people to onboard into web3, right there, so they’re truly in control of their assets in a contained experience. The current onboarding flow is sort of backward for most regular people. At first, for some reason, you need a crypto asset, then you should get a wallet ’cause someone told you to, then you have to find something to do with that wallet.” He added that this user onboarding flow needs to be inverted and “what people really want is to use an application and engage with a brand. That’s the desire they start out with.”

Furthermore, Will said that the wallet is equipped with multi-party computation capabilities that offer enhanced safety to users’ assets stored in the wallet. This safety feature allows the user to share and distribute the access information among multiple parties, thus offering the primary feature of a Web3 wallet, i.e., greater control. He also shared the access flow chart of their wallet service. Will said that Coinbase’s new WaaS allows a user to seamlessly access a Web3 wallet through conventional encryption techniques like username and passwords, unlike other Web3 wallets that require a seed phrase from the user every time they try to access the wallet.