How Coinbase Might Bring 1 Billion People On-Chain Using Its Smart Wallet

Coinbase has launched its new smart wallet with partners such as DeFi lending protocol Moonwell, offering them freebies they can pass onto consumers to get more people on-chain.

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Coinbase’s “on-chain summer” has kicked off with the launch of its new smart wallet. This interview with Luke Youngblood, founding contributor to Moonwell, gives a peek at how it’s sweetening the pot for developers and users alike.

In this episode, Youngblood describes how smart wallets are different from traditional wallets, how they do away with past security issues, and the more minor potential risks that still do exist with smart wallets. He also gives details on the ways that Coinbase is trying to use its smart wallet to get users on-chain: making it much easier to transact on-chain directly from their Coinbase accounts, subsidizing gas costs for certain dapps, and making sure everything is web-accessible.

Plus, he explains why Moonwell chose Base, how it is branching out to non-crypto native DeFi users, such as populations that only have mobile phones and not desktop computers in geographies like Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and how the DeFi lending protocol differentiates itself from bigger ones that have established a beachhead on Base.

Show highlights:

How smart wallets differ from traditional wallets and embedded wallets
Why Luke is excited to be working with Coinbase smart wallet
What happens if the user loses the device linked to their smart wallet
How hard it would be for a hacker to try to get access to the assets in this smart wallet
How Coinbase is initially paying for user gas fees on dapps like Moonwell and other launch partners
How Coinbase’s Magic Spend feature enables users to transact on-chain straight from their Coinbase accounts
How Coinbase might keep paying gas fees for some dapps even after the initial launch period
Why the smart wallet is also accessible via the web, and not just through an app
Why Moonwell has focused on lending and borrowing
Why Moonwell chose to build on Base as opposed to, say, Solana
Moonwell’s plans to grow
How having access to Coinbase’s user base changes Moonwell’s strategy for attracting users

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Guest |

Luke Youngblood

Links |

Previous coverage on Unchained:
Coinbase Smart Wallet: Coinbase Launches Its Smart Wallets, Dubbing It Crypto’s ‘IPhone Moment’
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Unchained Podcast is Produced by Laura Shin Media, LLC. Distributed by CoinDesk. Senior Producer is Michele Musso and Executive Producer is Jared Schwartz.

HOST

Laura Shin

Laura Shin is a crypto journalist, host of the Unchained podcast, and author of “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze” (Public Affairs, 2022). Formerly a senior editor at Forbes, she was the first mainstream journalist to cover crypto full-time, and her podcasts and videos have had more than 15 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund, Singularity University and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and has a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. She lives in New York City.