At Coinbase, we have always envisioned a world where everyone can seamlessly participate onchain. Today, we’re launching the next evolution of self-custodial wallets. Smart wallets are a revolutionary step forward in our mission to bring more than 1 billion users onchain. These next-generation wallets address the biggest pain points of the crypto experience today—complex onboarding, network fees, and recovery phrases—making the transition to onchain smoother than ever. 

Smart wallets offer a streamlined, gasless onchain experience. This simplicity, combined with multi-chain support and integration with major applications, will make onboarding to the blockchain as effortless as signing into your favorite website. Until now, going onchain has been slow, expensive, and hard, with separate wallet app installs and first-generation blockchains. Smart wallets, with their ease of use, paired with next-generation Layer 2 networks like Base, finally set the stage to bring many more people onchain. Now, getting onchain is easy, fast, and cheap.

For existing Coinbase Wallet users, we’ll be building migration tools and support for smart wallets inside the Coinbase Wallet app in the coming months.

Smart Wallets Make Getting Onchain Simple

Smart Wallets allows users to create a free, secure, self-custody wallet in just a few seconds. They simplify onboarding, reduce the number of transactions to be signed, and seamlessly let you use your Coinbase balances onchain. No more topping off your wallet for gas fees or struggling with cross-app portability. With smart wallets, new users will be able to mint an NFT, trade on decentralized exchanges, or diversify their investment with DeFi apps in just a few clicks. Users can enjoy a fluid and intuitive experience without sacrificing self-custody or their security.

Some of the key benefits of Coinbase’s smart wallets include:

• Effortless onboarding: Create a new wallet and onboard in seconds without leaving the app you want to use, and without the hassle of recovery phrases, apps, or extensions. Use Face ID, your Google Chrome profile, fingerprint, or Yubikey to get started instantly.
• Easy to pay onchain: Pay with either your self-custodial wallet balance or your Coinbase account balances, and say goodbye to “insufficient balance” errors.
• Cross-app portability: Take your wallet, identity, and balances with you to thousands of popular onchain apps.
• Go gasless: Developers can choose to offer gasless experiences and sponsor transactions for their customers via paymaster integrations. 

Additionally, Coinbase offers a companion webapp that includes features like asset and identity management, buy, send, swap, NFTs, and transaction history, which will be the primary platform for smart wallets users to manage their wallet.

At launch, smart wallets will support most leading onchain apps, with more to come. Smart wallets will support 8 networks (Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB, Zora), with the goal to add more support in the future. 

Developers: Integrate Smart Wallets Into Your App for Faster Onboarding 

Onchain app developers today lose many of their new users during the onboarding process when they leave the app to go install and fund a separate wallet. Smart wallets are accessible directly from any browser, eliminating the need for app or extension installs. Other critical improvements include gas sponsorship via paymasters, batch transactions, and spending directly from Coinbase accounts. We’re pioneering new industry standards, enabling direct communication between apps and wallets, facilitating paymaster use, and supporting batch transactions without the need for API integrations (EIP-5792). We expect this suite of powerful features to dramatically transform conversion rates. 

Coinbase's smart wallets are now live and developers are encouraged to integrate or update their SDKs today to offer their users a superior onchain experience. Plus, integrating smart wallets are straightforward and only requires at most a few lines of code. Smart wallets are already integrated in all popular wallet libraries and aggregators, including WAGMI, Web3Modal, Privy, Dynamic, and Rainbowkit. Developers can update their existing Coinbase Wallet SDK, ensuring minimal disruption and a smooth transition. 

There are several compelling reasons for developers to integrate or upgrade to smart wallets today:  

• Qualify for Base Gas Credits: Developers can take advantage of up to $15k in gas credits through the Base Gasless Campaign, enabling sponsorship of their users’ transactions at zero cost. 
• Win ETH on Base for the Base Buildathon: Participating in the Base Buildathon offers developers the chance to win ETH on Base across 8 different tracks. There is an additional bonus pool of 40 ETH in rewards for successful integration of smart wallets and other Coinbase features. 
• Participate in Onchain Summer: By integrating smart wallets, developers can potentially feature their projects during Onchain Summer, gaining visibility and attracting a broader user base.

What’s Next

Our smart wallets represent a significant leap forward in the world of self-custody and onchain transactions. By addressing the main concerns of traditional self-custody wallets and providing a seamless, secure, and user-friendly experience, smart wallets are poised to transform the way we interact onchain. We’re excited for developers and users to take advantage of this new groundbreaking solution, and we believe that simplifying the onboarding experience will lead to widespread adoption.

And don’t forget: we’ll be celebrating all summer long with Onchain Summer. Anyone participating in Onchain Summer will have the opportunity to see just how fast and easy it is to get onchain. Developers are encouraged to build for Onchain Summer for a chance to be featured later in July.