Station Labs Founders to Join Coinbase to Work on Smart Wallet Base

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Tanzeel Akhtar

Journalist

Tanzeel Akhtar

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Tanzeel Akhtar has been covering the cryptocurrency and blockchain sector since 2015. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CoinDesk, Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin.com.

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June 4, 2024 03:58 EDT

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Cryptocurrency exchange giant Coinbase is expected to bring the Station Labs team in-house to work on its smart wallet Base using their expertise in building onchain developer tools, as per a release shared with CryptoNews.

The Base is built to be the onchain home for Coinbase products, users, and assets, as well as an open ecosystem where anyone can build for them. It has $130 billion in assets on its platform.

The Station Labs team was founded by Tina He and the cofounder is Mind Apivessa, both former Facebook employees.

Base functions on Optimism’s OP Stack, making it secure, scalable EVM Layer-2’s out there. The OP Stack is an open-source public good that will serve as the foundation for a “superchain” of L2s that share interoperability, sequencing, and governance.

The firm said one of the biggest barriers to growing on-chain adoption is the complexity of onboarding for both consumers and developers.

“Station’s founders have extensive experience building tooling for developers and creators to integrate core on-chain primitives such as wallets, token-based experiences, and abstracting away gas fees for consumers,” said Coinbase in a blog post.

As Base and the broader L2 ecosystem continue to grow, Coinbase said it is committed to providing developers with easy-to-use tooling to lower the barriers for consumers with phraseless, gasless, on-chain experiences.

“Station’s founders represent some of the brightest minds in the on-chain tools space and we look forward to working with them to bring the next generation of builders on-chain,” adds the firm.

Onchain transactions refer to those that occur directly on the blockchain. The transactions are recorded and validated on the blockchain, providing a level of security and transparency.

May Saw Surge in Google Search for ‘Onchain’ Term

In May, the term onchain saw an unprecedented surge in Google search interest, reaching an all-time high, as indicated by data from Google Trends.

Over the past five years, global search interest for the term had mostly remained below 25 out of 100, with a temporary spike to around 30 in March.

On Monday, Coinbase announced a donation of $25 million to the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake. The contribution matches recent donations made by Ripple, a crypto payments company, and Andreessen Horowitz, a tech-focused venture capital firm.

With Coinbase’s donation, Fairshake’s funding now stands at $160 million, firmly placing it among the top five largest super PACs for this election cycle.