Coinbase Giving: Insights From The Blockchain Breakthroughs for a Better Future Challenge

May 4, 2022 Coinbase

By Darin Carter, Coinbase Giving Program Manager

What is the Innovation Challenge

This fall, Coinbase Giving launched the Blockchain Breakthroughs Innovation Challenge as a step to raise awareness about blockchain technology and make it more inclusive and accessible for everyone. The purpose of this challenge was to source innovative ideas for how to leverage the unique attributes of blockchain technology to solve some of our world’s most prominent problems. We saw participation from over 300 teams and heard some incredible ideas.

The goal of this challenge was not to ask these competitors to come up with a fully baked solution, but to incentivize the builders at the intersection of Web3 and social impact to try out many solutions, share results/progress, and build a better world together as a community, with their findings.

How it worked

In October 2021, Coinbase Giving and its partner Base 11 launched the Innovation challenge, in partnership with crowdsourcing website HeroX.com, at the Next Frontier Conference to highlight how blockchain technology can drive social impact.
The Challenge was made accessible to students and early-career adults from across the country on Base 11’s free membership platform Base 11 Digital.
In early January of 2022, our subject matter experts judged the first round of entries internally according to our innovation challenge scoring framework.
Twelve finalists were invited to pitch their idea to our leadership team for consideration.
After a final round of judging, Coinbase Giving and Base11 awarded $10,000 USD in prizes to winners which could be received in USD, BTC, or ETH.

Winning projects proposed how blockchain technology can be leveraged across the topics of renewable energy micro-grids, the debt crisis, global resource support, smart-contract life insurance, voting fraud, and much more. The full list of winners, with additional details on the projects and communities they serve, can be found here.

What we learned

Innovation can come from anywhere: Our participants represented countries all over the world including New Zealand, Germany, the Philippines, Argentina, Colombia, and many more countries around the globe. We’re proud to say that the best ideas came from outside of the crypto industry. Our participants were teachers, doctors, dentists, psychologists, supply chain workers, community leaders, and more looking to share their amazing ideas for how blockchain can make a difference.
Asking the right question can be powerful: By asking people from various backgrounds how blockchain can make an impact, specifically in areas like environmental sustainability, financial inclusion, healthcare and education, the people who are closest to the problems worth solving are able to surface ideas on how blockchain can be applied as a solution.
Blockchain truly has the potential to change the world: As you can see from our winning entries mentioned above, there are many ways that blockchain can have a positive impact in the world.

The Coinbase Giving and Base 11 teams would like to thank all of the participants in this year’s Blockchain Breakthroughs Innovation Challenge for their ideas, hard work, and time. We are looking forward to the next Innovation Challenge and encourage everyone to start brainstorming ideas to pitch to the team.

Coinbase Giving: Insights From The Blockchain Breakthroughs for a Better Future Challenge was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Improving Transaction Privacy on the Bitcoin Blockchain

May 2, 2022 Coinbase

Tl;dr: This report updates on what Josie, a Bitcoin CoreDev, and Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient, has been working on over the first part of their year-long Crypto development grant. This specifically covers their work on bitcoin transaction privacy.

Since late last year, I have been working with a group of researchers on a project centered around Bitcoin transactions with two or fewer outputs. While the research is still on-going, we identified an opportunity for improvement with respect to Bitcoin transaction privacy. This post details the motivation for the change and work completed thus far.

Privacy in Bitcoin transactions

When thinking about privacy in Bitcoin, I find the following definition helpful:

“Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world” — Eric Hughes (1993)

This definition motivates the following statement, “Software should never reveal more information than necessary about a user’s activity.” Applied to Bitcoin transactions, this means we should attempt to keep the payment address and amount private between the payer and payee. One way to break this privacy today is through the “Payment to a different script type” heuristic.

In short, this heuristic works by inferring which of the outputs in a transaction is the change output by examining script types. If a transaction is funded with bech32 (native segwit) inputs and has two outputs, one P2SH and the other bech32, it is reasonable to infer the bech32 output is a change address generated by the payee’s wallet. This allows an outside observer to infer the payment value and change value with reasonable accuracy.

How big of a problem is this?

But how often does this happen? Is this worth improving at all or is it a rare edge case? Let’s look at some data!

Payments to different script types over time

In analyzing transactions from 2010 — present, we found this type of transaction first appearing after the 2012 activation of P2SH addresses, and growing significantly after the 2017 segwit activation. From 2018 onward, these types of transactions account for ~30% of all transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is expected to continue to increase over time as we see increased taproot adoption, which introduces the new bech32m address encoding. This means that we have an opportunity to improve privacy for up to 30% of all Bitcoin transactions today if every wallet had a solution for this.

How can we improve this?

The first step to solve this problem is to match the payment address type when generating a change output. From our earlier example, this means our wallet should instead generate a P2SH address so that the transaction is now bech32 inputs to two P2SH outputs, effectively hiding which of the outputs is the payment and which is the change.

This was logic was merged into Bitcoin core in #23789 — meaning that our wallet will now have a mix of output types depending on our payment patterns. What happens when we spend these UTXOs? Is our privacy from the original transaction still preserved?

Mixing output types when funding a transaction

As it turns out, we might still leak information about our first transaction (txid: a) when spending the change output in a subsequent transaction. Consider the following scenario:

mixing input types in subsequent transactions

Alice has a wallet with bech32 type UTXOs and pays Bob, who gives them a P2SH address
Alice’s wallet generates a P2SH change output, preserving their privacy in txid: a
Alice then pays Carol, who gives them a bech32 address
Alice’s wallet combines the P2SH UTXO with a bech32 UTXO and txid: b has two bech32 outputs

From an outsider observer’s perspective, it is reasonable to infer that the P2SH Output in txid: b was the change from txid: a. To avoid leaking information about txid: a, Alice’s wallet should avoid mixing the P2SH output with other output types and either fund the transaction with only P2SH outputs or with only bech32 outputs. As a bonus, if txid: b can be funded with the P2SH output, the change from txid: b will be bech32, effectively cleaning the P2SH output out of the wallet by converting it to a payment and bech32 change.

Avoid mixing different output types during coin selection

I have been implementing this logic in Github with ongoing work and review..

If this topic is interesting to you, or if you are looking for ways to get involved with Bitcoin Core development, you can participate in the upcoming Bitcoin PR Review Club for #24584 (or read the logs from the meeting).

Ongoing work

If this logic is merged into Bitcoin Core, my hope is that other wallets will also implement both change address matching and avoid mixing output types during coin selection, improving privacy for all Bitcoin users.

This work has inspired a number of ideas for improving privacy in the Bitcoin Core wallet, as well as improving how we test and evaluate changes to coin selection. Many thanks to Coinbase for supporting my work — I hope to find other opportunities for improvement motivated by analysis as our research continues.

Coinbase is officially seeking applications for our 2022 developer grants focused on blockchain developers who contribute directly to a blockchain codebase, or researchers producing white papers. Learn more about the call for applications here.

Improving Transaction Privacy on the Bitcoin Blockchain was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hierarchical Threshold Signature Scheme — An Approach to Distinguish Singers in Threshold…

March 25, 2022 Coinbase

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Hierarchical Threshold Signature Scheme — An Approach to Distinguish Singers in Threshold Signature Scheme

This report updates on what AMIS, Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient, has been working on over the first part of their year-long Crypto development grant. This specifically covers their work on hierarchical threshold signature.

Introduction

AMIS is a financial technology company creating bonds between traditional and decentralized worlds. We provide security and accessibility for blockchains as well as for cryptocurrencies. With us, our customers can manage blockchain technology with ease and confidence.

What is MPC?

Distributed computing in computer science focuses on achieving the common purpose by a system having separate components, which are connecting, interacting, and conveying messages to each other. Multi-Party Computation (abbrev. MPC) makes sure the desired tasks are executed securely in a distributed system to prevent malicious entities. Many malicious entities steal the inputs of all components in the system or induce to deviate the correct results for their own purposes. Therefore, any secure protocols of MPC require the following two properties:

Privacy: Each party should not learn anything more than its prescribed output.
Correctness: Each party is guaranteed the correct output.

Why do we need to merge crypto private keys with MPC?

In the world of blockchain, the possession of private keys is the control of your assets. How do you protect your private key? A natural answer is that you entrust professional custodial service to manage private keys. However, it is easy to become the target of hackers. On the other hand, if users hold private keys, it is very likely to be stolen by adversaries due to weak awareness of information security, or some inappropriate operations.

Inspired by the practice of maintaining treasure maps, a naive idea is to divide the map into many parts and hide them in the distributed places. In this setting, the cost of attacks will increase owing to multiple spots. The next upcoming question is how to safely take these parts out for use. Since we are now in a distributed system, MPC becomes a natural option to solve the issue. This is because each component can safely and correctly execute the computational requirements guaranteed by MPC.

Threshold signature scheme (abbrev. TSS), a special application of MPC technology, dramatically decreases the risk of private key management. Most importantly, TSS does not save the private key, which is *split* into many parts called “share”, on the server and provides risk control as well as separation of duties. Meanwhile, compared to multi-signature, TSS provides the native multi-signature capability for those blockchains that lack shorter signatures and better privacy. These significant advantages make TSS suitable for implementing hot wallets without revealing private keys and providing the service in real-time.

Who is Alice?

Compared to TSS, shares in this Hierarchical Threshold Signature Scheme (abbrev. HTSS) are allowed to have different ranks. The main merit of this scheme is vertical access control such that it has “partial accountability”. Although TSS achieves joint control to disperse risk among the participants and avoid single points of failure, the importance of all shares is equal. It is impossible to distinguish which share gets involved in an unexpected signature which is because TSS only supports horizontal access control. For example, an important contract not only requires enough signatures but also needs to be signed by a manager. In the HTSS framework, assigning different ranks of each share induces that any valid signature generated includes the share of the manager. We call this library Alice. The aim of Alice is to provide an open and audited TSS Library. At the same time, we will also organize some useful cryptography libraries independently in the developing process. In addition, AMIS will continuously keep updating this library and fixing potential security issues.

By means of sharing articles in the medium and opening research papers and libraries continuously, AMIS is motivated to a progressively higher capability. More precisely, we have:

Except for academic research, AMIS also developed the following products:

Roadmap and progress

In March, we will implement a new protocol of ECDSA: UC Non-Interactive, Proactive, Threshold ECDSA with Identifiable Aborts including Key Generation, Key-Refresh & AuxiliaryInformation, Three-Round Sign, and Six-Round Sign. The part that hasn’t been integrated yet is the echo protocol which provides a secure broadcast environment for each node but adds one extra round of communication.

For EdDSA, we also adopt the well-known protocol: FROST, which supports the elliptic curves: ed25519 and sr25519. However, this part has not been integrated into the master branch of Alice. Of course, the above libraries also support Hierarchical secret sharing. We hope to complete all the above-mentioned tasks in May and prepare to audit in June. Finally, I am very grateful for the support of Coinbase’s grant, so that we can continue to accomplish this project.

Hierarchical Threshold Signature Scheme — An Approach to Distinguish Singers in Threshold… was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

WEFUZZ, a fully decentralized, crowdsourced security audit and bug bounty solution

February 22, 2022 Coinbase

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This report updates on what WEFUZZ, Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient, has been working on over the first part of their year-long Crypto development grant. This specifically covers their work on a decentralized, crowdsourced security audit and bug bounty solution.

By WEFUZZ, Coinbase Crypto Community Fund grant recipient

Introduction

WEFUZZ implements a fully decentralized, crowdsourced security audit and bug bounty solution: a set of smart contracts that allow developers and companies to get their smart contracts, blockchains, websites, etc., audited by the auditors and hackers community. With this work, WEFUZZ aims to become the *Hacker DAO*.

What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods or services — including ideas, voting, micro-tasks etc., from a large, relatively open, and rapidly evolving group of participants. Companies like Uber, Gitcoin and GoJek already use this model. Crowdsourcing model offers improved costs, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability, and diversity.

The Need for a decentralized crowdsourced platform?

The traditional crowdsourcing system consists mainly of three roles: requesters, workers (auditors in our case), and a centralized system. Requesters submit tasks to be completed through the crowdsourcing system. A set of auditors complete this task and submit solutions to the crowdsourcing system. Requesters will then select a proper solution (usually the first or the best one that solves the task) and reward the corresponding worker

This makes centralized systems vulnerable. User’s sensitive information (e.g. name, email address etc.,) and vulnerability reports are saved in the database of these centralized systems, which has the inherent risk of privacy disclosure and data loss. Centralized choke points are not only attack vectors for leaks and hacks, but also for outages.

Crowdsourcing companies are keen on maximizing their benefits and require requesters paying for services, which in turn increase user’s costs. Most crowdsourcing systems demand a 10–25% service fee.

All these issues add up to the already existing concerns of smart contract and multi-chains owners and developers (the audit requesters), freelance auditors’ and ethical hackers’ concerns. Some of these concerns are:

Ensuring their assets are safe from cyber theft, data hacks or any other risk that can result in a loss of funds and compromised data
Being able to get audits done in a cost-effective way — be it private or public security audits
Making sure the smart contracts are audited by multiple auditors
Hackers do not want to share sensitive personal data
Hackers and auditors and developers need complete transparency

WEFUZZ: Fully decentralized, crowdsourced audit and bug bounty platform

WEFUZZ is a fully decentralized, crowdsourced audit and bug bounty platform aiming to be the Hacker DAO. WEFUZZ aims to provide reliability, fairness, security and low service fees by design.

The decentralized platform has many advantages such as higher user security, service availability, and lower costs. Smart contracts running on a chosen blockchain are used to perform the whole process of crowdsourcing tasks which contains posting audit and bounty campaigns, submitting audit and bug reports, bounty assignment, etc.

WEFUZZ solution offers numerous added benefits to users:

Data Security: Reports are encrypted with auditors’ and target developers’ public key, so that the bug reports only gets read by who it is intended for. Files are encrypted and stored on the decentralized network storage. No more data breaches, hacks, password leaks or any other risk affecting existing cloud based audit and bug bounty platforms.
Cost Effectiveness: Allowing smart contract developers, multi-chain developers, and companies to get audits performed in a cost-effective way directly by the auditors and hacker crowd on the WEFUZZ platform. This helps the developers and companies avoid huge fees and congestion issues affecting the traditional bug bounty platforms.
Flexible anonymity: Auditors and hackers can choose to remain anonymous while submitting reports, protecting their privacy, and still getting paid.
Communication Security: No centralized data storage, complete anonymity, no data transfers, no moderators and complete end-to-end encryption. All the data resides encrypted on the Solana blockchain and all the files reside on the IPFS blockchain.

Persona

Audit Requestors: Developers, companies or any individual can request audits or start a private/public bug bounty campaign.

Auditors: Auditors can be anyone from ethical hackers to audit firms who can perform the requested audits or participate in bug bounty campaigns.

Judges: Judges are community members who are either elected by the community or have been raised to the Judge category through reputation.

Roadmap and progress

Currently, we are working on the conceptualization, technical architecture, and system design of WEFUZZ, besides building our MVP on Solana and Polygon blockchains, and testing the optimal chain for our project.

Please join our Discord and follow us on our Twitter and Medium to keep track of the progress. We are going to release the code and other tools we build as part of the research and development in this Github account.

WEFUZZ, a fully decentralized, crowdsourced security audit and bug bounty solution was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2022 Developer Grants Call for Applications

February 10, 2022 Coinbase

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By: Trent Fuenmayor, Program Manager, Coinbase Giving

Coinbase’s mission is to increase economic freedom in the world through the crypto-economy. To achieve this, it is essential to develop common infrastructure that is transparent, safe, secure, and benefits all participants. The open source community has provided critical support for Crypto development, with some support from donations from industry organizations and academic institutions. Our goal is to similarly support developers who are committed to growing and maintaining the Crypto ecosystem.

We launched our Crypto Community Fund in 2020 to aid this community effort, and in 2022 we’ve allocated up to $5M through Coinbase Giving, our philanthropic arm, to expand the program. Today, we have officially opened applications for our 2022 developer grants focused on blockchain developers who contribute directly to a blockchain codebase or researchers producing white papers addressing one or more of the following themes:

Scalability and interoperability of blockchains: Scalability is a huge barrier to adoption. Current development varies between layer 2 protocols, and has different consensus mechanisms and layer 1 structures. While much of this work has high monetary value, we are specifically looking to fund novel approaches and applications which are not so easily monetized (for example: rollups that originate in math/graph theories).
Privacy, Identity, and Zero Knowledge research: Financial privacy is a critical and necessary development for a widespread, safe adoption of crypto. In a world where personal privacy is increasingly at risk, we recognize that the public and permanent broadcasting of transaction history can be concerning. We are open to any applications related to this area, but we are particularly interested in development related to composable privacy — privacy preservation which can be combined with smart contract ecosystems. For example, this may lend itself to academic zero knowledge research.
Protocol security, audit research, developer experience, and other foundational infrastructure: The crypto-economy should be safe for all users, and this is only possible when the protocols themselves are verifiably safe. This could take the form of a better developer experience, so that common bugs are easier to avoid, better audit tooling, or even work like Solidify, our static analysis tool. To this end, we’re looking for projects which improve the foundational security of contracts, prevent exploits, and otherwise do the needful, inglorious, sometimes non-monetizable work.
Environmental footprint: For the crypto-economy to have a place in the mainstream, it must be sustainable. While there is still much to understand about the scale of impact, there’s no debate that mining is energy-intensive. We’re excited to see applications with innovative solutions to address this generational challenge.
Wild card: If you are working on a foundational improvement and are finding it hard to get funding, we want to hear from you!

Eligibility and Preferences

We welcome applications across any blockchain.
We are open to submissions for any time frame, although our default is year-long grants.
Our primary focus is to fund initiatives that maximize community benefit (and that is typically harder to monetize) and/or research that advances the industry.
We seek diversity in applicants and projects.
Some examples of previous recipients can be found here.

Process

We encourage all blockchain developers and prospective developers to apply for a Crypto Community Fund grant here. We will consider these applications on a rolling basis.

Proposals will be shortlisted by current crypto developers and important community members. Coinbase will make the final decision.

This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.

2022 Developer Grants Call for Applications was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Announcing our second developer grant winners

January 13, 2022 Coinbase

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By Trent Fuenmayor, Program Manager, Coinbase Giving

In August, we made a call for applications through our Crypto Community Fund focused on blockchain developers who contribute directly to a blockchain codebase, or researchers producing white papers. Today, we’re excited to announce the Fund’s second batch of developer grants to 6 recipients: AMIS Technologies, Josie, Escanor Liones, WeFuzz Research, and two developers funded through a partnership with Brink.

All candidates demonstrated a consistent history of contributing to blockchains, as well as innovative ideas, and provided the Fund’s advisory board with a clear, actionable outline of the projects they intend to work on. They will both be funded to work on their projects for all of 2022, with their grants funded in BTC or USD based on the recipient’s preference.

AMIS Technologies (github, blog) will be providing various digital signature protocols based on multi-party computation (abbrev. MPC) in the blockchain including ECDSA, Schnorr Signature, Bls Signature, and Bip32( i.e. Hierarchical deterministic wallet). The audited Library will continue to open to developers. They believe that MPC will be an alternative option for private key management.

Josie (github, twitter) will be working on the unit, functional, and fuzz testing in Bitcoin Core by focusing on improving test coverage and refactoring for performance and clarity. He will also be supporting three researchers on a project centered around analyzing bitcoin transactions, specifically on fees and privacy when used as a means of payment. Last but not least, he will be performing code review and testing PRs in Bitcoin Core.

Escanor Liones (github, twiter) will be designing and implementing a sequence of blockchains to promote the study, advancement and improvement of mathematics, cryptography and digital security. The present grant will fund one of those blockchains. His previous published work focused on Information-Theoretical Private Information Retrieval (IT-PIR) in the form of a practical Postgres C/C++ Extension using Quantum Resistant Lattice-based Cryptography; see the open sourced implementation here. A paper will be published with the details about the design in early summer; and, a blog or a paper towards the end of the year speaking to the implementation and the experience of designing, building and deploying a blockchain.

WeFuzz (github, twitter, website, discord) plans to build a, fully decentralized, crowdsourced security audit and bug bounty platform: a set of smart contracts that allow developers and companies to get their smart contracts, blockchains, web3 applications etc., audited by the decentralized auditors’ and hackers’ community and makes it easy for everyone to secure their assets. WEFUZZ (Chaitanya and Ranjeet) aims to become the *Hacker DAO*.

Brink (website) is a 501c3 that exists to strengthen the Bitcoin protocol and network through fundamental research and development, and to support the Bitcoin developer community through funding, education, and mentoring. They support and mentor new contributors to open source Bitcoin development through their fellowship program, and support the work of established Bitcoin protocol engineers through their grants program. Coinbase has funded two Bitcoin core developers through their partnership with Brink.

The Crypto Community Fund grantees will provide periodic updates about their work through public blog posts. The Fund will also be placing an additional call for developer grants later this year, and encourages future applicants to subscribe to updates here.

Announcing our second developer grant winners was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s get more people into the cryptoeconomy — An update to corporate giving at Coinbase

May 3, 2021 Coinbase

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Coinbase Giving: how we are operationalizing our commitment to Pledge 1%

Prior to our recent direct listing, in April 2020, we partnered with Pledge 1% to build a corporate giving program that would commit 1% of Coinbase profits, equity, and employee time toward charitable activities that leverage the power of crypto to help people around the world.

We partnered with Pledge 1% because realize that our vision of creating economic freedom for every person and business in the world is ambitious. We also know that for it to become a reality, we’ll need to not only build the products and services that our customers want, but to also think creatively about how we can ensure that crypto gets into the hands of those who need it most.

We are calling our Pledge 1% program Coinbase Giving. It will be a charitable program within Coinbase, focused on a common goal of increasing economic freedom for every person and business in the world. One of the limitations of traditional corporate philanthropy is that most companies don’t have the resources or the expertise to manage their philanthropic programs, instead they rely on funding charitable organizations to achieve their public-spirited goals. Coinbase Giving is taking a different approach: a hybrid model following the path forged by other tech leaders. Coinbase Giving will not only support charities that share our mission and values, but we’ll also manage our own programs from start to finish.

The charities that we will support and programs that we will drive will fall into three broad categories:

Increasing education around, and access to, crypto
Accelerating the development of crypto protocols that underpin the cryptoeconomy
Fostering the next generation of crypto talent, no matter where they are located

Our three initial areas of focus

1. Bringing GiveCrypto into the Coinbase family as a Coinbase 501(c)(3) foundation. GiveCrypto was founded in 2018 with a mission to financially empower people by distributing cryptocurrency globally. We’ve long had a relationship with GiveCrypto, but by transitioning its efforts into a private foundation of Coinbase we can substantially increase funding, and offer Coinbase customers the opportunity to give directly to the programs that they want to support.

The new foundation will focus its efforts on supporting and directly managing programs that seek to equalize access to financial services around the globe; use direct crypto contributions to alleviate financial hardship and unsafe situations; and encourage crypto entrepreneurship to create economic freedom.

That reach can be truly life-changing.

https://medium.com/media/1dbdc70669bdcae97be6e3785e21a510/href

2. Expanding the Crypto Community Fund. We believe helping to connect and grow the cryptoeconomy is essential to creating economic equality. Our Crypto Community Fund aims to grow and improve the entire crypto industry, while making it simpler to use and more secure for everyone.

We piloted the Crypto Community Fund in October 2020 to help accelerate research and open-source projects. We have funded $200K to date — $100K to Stanford Cryptography and $100K to a Bitcoin Core development developer. In 2021 we expect to fund $2M to expand this program, and we know much more is possible.

3. Launching Coinbase’s partnership with Base 11 to develop the next generation of (diverse) crypto talent. We’re also announcing today our commitment to be a 3-year “Game Changer” partner of Base 11, a nonprofit STEM workforce and entrepreneur development organization that empowers women and underrepresented minorities with the access, awareness and belief needed to succeed in Next Frontier Industries of the 21st century.

As part of this partnership, we will be developing a Crypto Innovation Challenge program that will be unveiled later this year, to help cement crypto as a frontier industry and unlock its future talent. We’re proud to partner with Base 11 as they empower the next generation of crypto entrepreneurs and users.

https://medium.com/media/3476fb6433adde3dc50fad3f3b5aa4e8/href

Employee match program

In addition to the initiatives outlined above, beginning in June, we will begin matching on a one-for-one basis any employee donation to a qualified 501(c)(3) (or international equivalent) up to $500. As we pilot this program this year, we’re excited to support our team and the causes and organizations they are passionate about.

We believe strongly in the power of crypto to address any number of the inequities of the current financial system. But we also recognize that there is a lot to be done when it comes to creating economic freedom for every person and business in the world. As Coinbase and the cryptoeconomy grow, we’re committed to doing our part to ensure that we never stray far from crypto’s original promise of an open financial system.

We’re just at the beginning — but we’re here for the long term.

About Pledge 1%
Pledge 1% is a global movement that inspires, educates, and empowers every entrepreneur, company, and employee to be a force for good. Over 12,000 members in 100 countries around the world have used Pledge 1%’s flexible framework to ignite billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours in new philanthropy. To learn more about Pledge 1%, and how your company can get involved, visit pledge1percent.org.

Let’s get more people into the cryptoeconomy — An update to corporate giving at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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