San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase is diving deeper into the world of Web 3 with its new product.
Coinbase Pay Taps Web3
As part of its mission to increase economic freedom in the world, Coinbase has announced the launch of a Web 3-focused payments service, called, Coinbase Pay. The official blog post revealed that the new feature will be introduced to the Coinbase users’ crypto wallet browser extension and will help them streamline access to decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces.
Over the past year, DeFi, NFTs, and other Web3 services have witnessed tremendous adoption. However, processes associated with accessibility and use of these services – funding a self-custody wallet – continue to be a major hurdle. Coinbase Pay aims to eliminate these numerous steps of switching between apps, and manual transfers to participate in DeFi or purchase NFTs. In short, the new services will enable users to use their crypto wallet via Google’s Chrome web browser to avoid the cumbersome steps required to link up with Web3 services.
According to Coinbase’s senior director of product management Prakash Hariramani, the users of the exchange residing in the United States and Canada can currently use their debit cards and bank accounts for transfers. Expansion of Coinbase Pay to bring the benefits of easy fiat onramp to the crypto ecosystem is also on the horizon of the exchange giant.
Coinbase stated,
“With the Coinbase Wallet extension, your Chrome browser can securely interact and engage with all manner of web3 applications. Kickstart your NFT collection, earn yield through DeFi lending protocols, and grow your crypto portfolio with hundreds of thousands of tokens supported via decentralized exchanges (DEXes).”
Coinbase NFT Marketplace
The latest development comes days after Coinbase announced that it was eyeing to launch an NFT marketplace. The official Twitter post regarding the same revealed that the platform has been in touch with more than 100 creators and plans on building the product based on community feedback.
https://twitter.com/Coinbase_NFT/status/1503471732941721601
Coinbase is one of the most established players in the cryptocurrency ecosystem that complies with legal regulations laid down by the American government. Hence, an NFT platform would put the exchange in direct competition with other leading marketplaces such as Binance NFT, OpenSea, Rarible, etc.
The talks about the NFT marketplace first started in October last year. Coinbase has stated that the launch will be soon but is yet to reveal the specific date. As reported by Blockchain Journal earlier, the upcoming NFT marketplace would help its “68 million verified users and 8.8 million active users to trade and showcase their tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.”
