Coinbase Debuts Smart Wallets

Coinbase has introduced its new "smart wallet," designed to ease onboarding and enable gasless transactions.

What's the scoop?

• User-Friendly Features: The wallet allows new users to create accounts using Face ID, Google Chrome profile, fingerprint, or Yubikey.
• Fund Management: Users can avoid "insufficient balance" errors by pulling from their self-custodial wallet and Coinbase account balances.
• Gasless Transactions on Multiple Networks: Developers can sponsor transaction costs via paymaster integrations, enabling gasless operations across Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB, and Zora.

Bankless Take:

A long-awaited upgrade, Coinbase’s smart wallets can significantly drive the industry toward mainstream adoption by easing all the initial friction points from using blockchains.

Crypto developers have shown excitement around integrating these features into their apps — the setup process of which takes only 15 seconds! Coinbase has been hard at work building functionality for simpler access to crypto, having also released a tool for people to send and receive crypto through text links. If all goes well, it may really be an Onchain Summer.