Behind the scenes of how we build, scale, and optimize @Coinbase
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Joined February 2025
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Engineering Coinbase at scale takes orchestration.
CB Agent, our internal platform, brings specialized agents from across the company together to help our teams build and ship, drawing on everything we've learned across millions of PRs at Coinbase.
@rwitoff takes you behind the scenes.
More in his conversation with @ollieforsyth on the New Economies podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7newd5…
Join Coinbase Senior Director Josh Leavitt as he breaks down how we give employees access to 100+ AI models while keeping costs in check.
→ Free virtual event
→ October 23, 2026 @ 3pm ET
→ RSVP here 👇 sectionai.com/events/live-ev…
Coinbase successfully migrated 300+ namespaces across 300+ services from self-hosted @temporalio to Temporal Cloud.
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Discover how we achieved seamless zero-downtime cutovers using a "dual worker" strategy, centralized codec server, and mTLS: coinbase.com/blog/migrating-…
Coinbase Platform retweeted
We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case).
I think we'll see more of this pattern inside companies. The frontier models are amazing generalists. But increasingly you'll see specialist models out perform on more narrow tasks, either working on teams, or by themselves.
We're making it easy to fine tune models internally for our employees. We even have a skill for it in our internal harness that makes it easy to spin these up and start training them:
"/fine-tune-and-serve-llm I want to fine-tune Qwen for payments risk review. help me get started"
I imagine we'll have some backend services that could be replaced entirely by this new architecture.
We gave AI agents the exact same identity and access controls as human employees at Coinbase.
Here’s how we built it:
Identity & Scoping: Every agent has a permanent identity and a named human owner. Each run gets a short-lived, verifiable credential so permissions stay tight.
Guardrails: Agents inherit standard employee groups and approval flows, configured to never exceed their owner’s permissions while undergoing continuous access reviews to maintain least privilege.
MCP Gateway: Authorizes and logs every tool call into a single audit trail: User → Agent → Run → Tool → Outcome.
Global Kill Switch: If needed, one switch immediately terminates running sessions and cuts access on its next tool call across all integrated tools. No hunting down individual credentials.
Humans and agents share one identity model, one authorization path, and one audit trail.
Teams can ship new agent platforms without rebuilding security from scratch every time. As AI moves from answering questions to executing real actions, we can scale them with the same rigor we apply to people.
We will be migrating the privileged onchain roles for cbBTC, cbDOGE, cbADA, cbLTC, cbXRP and cbMEGA smart contracts to our modern system in the coming days.
All staking operations, rewards, and transfers will continue to function normally with zero downtime expected.
No action is needed by users or protocols.
The migration of the privileged onchain roles for cbBTC, cbDOGE, cbADA, cbLTC, cbXRP and cbMEGA smart contracts to our modern system is complete.
All transfers are functioning normally.
We will be migrating the privileged onchain roles for cbBTC, cbDOGE, cbADA, cbLTC, cbXRP and cbMEGA smart contracts to our modern system in the coming days.
All staking operations, rewards, and transfers will continue to function normally with zero downtime expected.
No action is needed by users or protocols.
cbADA 🤝@Solana
Powered by @Chainlink CCIP
Sunrise introduces new opportunities on @Solana with @Coinbase wrapped assets like $cbADA.
A wider world of assets.
$cbADA is bridged to Solana via @Chainlink CCIP as Coinbase’s exclusive wrapped asset cross-chain infra provider.
cbLTC is now available on @Solana
Powered by @Chainlink CCIP
Sunrise expands the range of assets available on @Solana, while supporting different infrastructure under the hood.
base:0xcb17c9db87b595717c857a08468793f5bab6445f is bridged to Solana via @Chainlink CCIP as @Coinbase’s exclusive wrapped asset cross-chain infra provider.
With base:0xcb17c9db87b595717c857a08468793f5bab6445f, more of Coinbase’s wrapped assets are now accessible across Solana.
Coinbase Platform retweeted
More detail on how we're automating pentesting at Coinbase.
Every change we make now gets an industry leading pentest, informed by 10+ years of internal findings.
coinbase.com/blog/consumer-p…
Don't miss our VP of Engineering, Siwei Shen, discussing how Coinbase built an AI-native engineering org at the @WeAreDevs conference in San Jose, CA this week!
Date: Friday, September 25, 2026
Time: 9:40am - 10:10am PT
With CDS Playground, a designer can leverage any Agent they choose, describe what they want to build, and start building a real CDS UI immediately.
It's AI-powered prototyping without the DevOps tax.
We hooked Coinbase Design System (CDS) directly into coding agents via custom Agent Skills, MCP, & Figma Code Connect.
Agents auto-detect React vs React Native, grab exact tokens/primitives, & skip hallucinated styles. Plus, a zero-config browser playground for instant prod code.
TL;DR: Anyone at Coinbase can build real, working prototypes in minutes that match our exact design systems standards.
Read more: coinbase.com/blog/how-coinba…
We hooked Coinbase Design System (CDS) directly into coding agents via custom Agent Skills, MCP, & Figma Code Connect.
Agents auto-detect React vs React Native, grab exact tokens/primitives, & skip hallucinated styles. Plus, a zero-config browser playground for instant prod code.
TL;DR: Anyone at Coinbase can build real, working prototypes in minutes that match our exact design systems standards.
Read more: coinbase.com/blog/how-coinba…
Coinbase Platform retweeted
cbBTC pairs are now live on Pons.
Users can now launch tokens paired with cbBTC on Robinhood Chain and tap into over $7.5 billion in Bitcoin-backed assets
Powered by @coinbase and @chainlink CCIP.
cbBTC 🌉Robinhood Chain
Powered via @Chainlink CCIP
NEW: @Coinbase’s cbBTC is expanding to @RobinhoodCrypto, powered by Chainlink CCIP as its exclusive cross-chain infra.
By connecting cbBTC to Robinhood Chain, ecosystem builders now have access to a Bitcoin-backed asset with over $7.5 billion in circulation.
Coinbase’s internal teams used to rely on many separate admin tools, each with its own authorization, audit, and rate limiting.
We replaced that sprawl with a single “Control Center” layer in front of domain services. It centralizes authorization, audit, approvals, and rate limits while letting product teams extend it safely via contracts and configuration, without turning the platform team into a bottleneck.
How we built it: coinbase.com/blog/how-coinba…
Our Q2 2026 @ethereum validator performance report is live.
Some highlights:
➡️ Reliability: 99.97% uptime vs. 99.76% network (0 slashing or double-signing events since inception)
➡️Rewards: 2.87% APY vs. 2.80% network
➡️Scale & distribution: 4.76M ETH staked to Coinbase validators (12.16% of total staked ETH)
➡️Client & relay diversity: 2 consensus clients (Lighthouse 72%, Prysm 28% of our fleet), 3 execution clients (Nethermind 39%, Reth 33%, Geth 28% of our fleet), and 7 MEV relays, with OFAC screening available as an option
Read the full report: coinbase.com/blog/ethereum-v…
The scheduled system maintenance is now in progress. We will provide updates on our status page and @CoinbasePltfrm: status.coinbase.com/
We've scheduled system maintenance for Sunday, August 16 around 1pm ET, estimated to last up to 4 hours. This time is an estimate and is subject to change.
During this time:
→ Your funds will be safe
→ Users may experience degraded performance across multiple products
More details on our status page: status.coinbase.com/