On Wednesday, Coinbase launched a new feature called “Coinbase Pay” that allows customers to fund their Coinbase wallet directly from a Chrome browser extension. According to the staff, Coinbase Pay plans to make it intuitive for anyone to participate in decentralized finance, or DeFi, exchange tokens on decentralized exchanges or DEXs, and buy non-replaceable tokens or NFTs with just a few clicks. Specifically, they wrote:
Before Coinbase Pay, users who wanted to add funds to their Coinbase wallets from the browser extension had to navigate to Coinbase.com, log into their account, copy their wallet address, and manually transfer funds from their Coinbase account. The process was not only cumbersome. , but also left the user vulnerable to user errors.”
With Coinbase Pay, all you need to do is select the currency you want to add to your wallet in Chrome, enter the amount and confirm the transaction. “No more switching between apps, copying and pasting addresses, and transferring money manually,” Coinbase staff wrote.
According to the company, users do not need a Coinbase.com account to use Coinbase Wallet. However, they would need to link their self-custody wallet to their Coinbase account before they can use Coinbase Pay as a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp service. Despite coming from a centralized exchange, private keys within the extension are stored by the user and not Coinbase.
Last month, Coinbase wallet enabled support for Ledger hardware wallet. By the end of last year, the exchange had grown to store 12% of all crypto in over 150 asset types. The company also has plans to launch its own NFT marketplace. At the time of publication, there are currently 3.86 million email addresses registered on the Coinbase NFT waiting list.