Coinbase launches a smart wallet with no gas fees and easy onboarding.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is launching a smart wallet. The new Coinbase Wallet offers users greater convenience by eliminating onboarding, gas fees, and making recovery phrases unnecessary.
Modern wallets overcome complexity
Smart wallets allow users to create a new wallet and onboard the blockchain without having to download a new app or receive a new recovery phrase. Instead, the smart wallet integrates with mainstream apps and uses facial recognition, users' Google Chrome profiles, fingerprint ID or UbiKey via a passkey stored on user devices.
The smart wallet will have auto-retention permission from the user's Coinbase Wallet or Coinbase account. Developers can choose to waive gas fees by sponsoring the transaction through the payer.
The companion web app will be the user's primary platform and will offer asset and identity management, purchasing, sending, exchanging, intangible tokens and transaction history. Coinbase promises a “fluid and intuitive experience” in these transactions.
Related: Coinbase Sees Endless Interoperability with Ethereum and USDC
At launch, the smart wallet supports Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB chain and Zora networks. The smart wallet will be free for both users and developers. In a post on Coinbase Canada's blog:
“This simplicity, combined with multi-chain support and integration with mainstream applications, makes logging into the blockchain as effortless as logging into your favorite website.”
Current users will be able to use the new wallet “in the coming months” after completing all migration tools.
Modern wallet technology is spreading.
Modern wallet technology is not new. Lopring and Argentum pioneered the technology in 2020. Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin embraced the idea in a blog post the following year, touting “social recovery” features that would increase security and eliminate recovery phrases.
A smart wallet discovery technology called “Account Summarization” on Ethereum appeared in March 2023 at the ERC-4337 standard. 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.
Magazine: ‘Account Summary' Supercharge Ethereum Wallet: A Dummies Guide
