At Coinbase, we believe a thriving and open ecosystem is necessary for the promise of crypto to be realized, ultimately leading to our mission of creating more economic freedom around the world. We recognize that by working together as a community, we can tackle some of our industry’s biggest challenges faster.
That’s why we established the Coinbase Protocol team, a dedicated/experienced group of engineers at Coinbase focused on contributing to scaling blockchains and community building. Specifically, this team will look at 1) contributing to open source projects, 2) integrating cutting edge technologies with Coinbase products, and 3) supporting developers through Coinbase’s grant programs.
We’re hiring builders who want to join us in our mission, and work on innovative projects that have the potential to scale blockchains by several orders of magnitude to reach our goal of billions users globally.
Integrating with Ethereum Scaling Solutions
One of the most exciting projects our Protocol team is working on is to help scale Ethereum through an integration with L2 and other scaling solutions. Scaling Ethereum will help address some of the biggest challenges, including high prices and long settlement times. We want to allow our customers to quickly and cheaply withdraw directly onto a supported L2 solution. Our hope is that we can help level the playing field and ensure retail users don’t get priced out of being able to participate in this burgeoning ecosystem. Just as we announced support for the Polygon network for both Coinbase Wallet and extension, we plan to integrate Polygon as our first scaling solution for Coinbase. Our goal is to explore similar scaling initiatives with L2s such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Starkware over time.
Contributing to open source projects
Initially, the Coinbase Protocol team will help advance the cause of the Ethereum Foundation by contributing software to support critical projects. We are exploring many different paths forward here, including building the testing infrastructure, being early testers of new builds, and developing other tools needed at scale. This builds on our history of supporting open source initiatives, including Rosetta, an open-source specification and set of tools that makes integrating with blockchains simpler, faster, and more reliable. We currently have more than 35 blockchains supporting the Rosetta standard.
Community Grants
Last year, we launched the Crypto Community Fund to fund innovative projects initially focused in Bitcoin Core development, and the Rosetta Grants program to encourage further growth of the Rosetta ecosystem.
We recently announced that we’re officially seeking applications for our 2021 developer grants focused on blockchain developers who contribute directly to a blockchain codebase, or researchers producing white papers addressing one or more of the following themes:
Scalability
Privacy, Identity and Zero Knowledge research
Protocol security, audit research, developer experience, and other foundational infrastructure
Environmental footprint
Wildcard (other projects focused on foundational improvements in blockchain)
We intend to continue to expand our scope with these grants, so that we can invest in the people who are building the future of crypto.
We’d like to hear from you on what projects our Protocol team should address. Drop us a line at [email protected]. And if you’re interested in joining us on this journey, please come build with us. We’re hiring.
was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
