shazow on Warpcast

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https://onchainsummer.xyz

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jesse.base.eth 🔵 pfp

jesse.base.eth 🔵

AMA - will be answering questions for the next ~1-2 hours!

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Cassie Heart pfp

Congrats on the promo. With your new position, what do you feel like you will be more capable of effecting change on at Coinbase that was previously not possible?

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jesse.base.eth 🔵 pfp

jesse.base.eth 🔵

thanks! candidly, I feel pretty grateful that since I've been at the company for a long time + have a track record of delivering value, i've *already* been pretty in the loop on most company decisions. that said i think with this change, i'll have more visibility + have a slightly stronger voice. and i'm hopeful that with that new platform, i'm able to push the company to lean more aggressively into our onchain future. the technology platform is finally ready and now we gotta go build all the incredible use cases that show the world what's really possible.

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Cassie Heart pfp

Leaning forward into an on chain future, do you perceive a wind change with respect to embracing privacy preserving assets/technologies, or is this still out of scope for Coinbase?

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jesse.base.eth 🔵 pfp

jesse.base.eth 🔵

yes! we had our @base 2025 strategy offsite a couple weeks ago and once of the things that bubbled up was that we had to make a meaningful investment in privacy in the year ahead. we had similar feeling around L2 in 2023 and smart wallets in 2024. privacy is the next big technology upgrade for us to tackle.

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What does investing in privacy look like from the L2 perspective?

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jesse.base.eth 🔵 pfp

jesse.base.eth 🔵

short term - i think we should stand up a compliant privacy pool on base. lots of good work has been done on this. people will be able to use this in the same way they use coinbase.com today — to route through to get new private addresses. on top of this, other people can build things like one click "get me a new private address" in wallets — it's a very simple primitive, but unlocks a ton. medium term - in parallel, we need to do R&D to figure out how we build privacy natively into the smart wallet + L2 stack. the UX I have in my head is basically you can send and receive from private.jesse.base.eth and it's fully private, with no UX complexity. how we get there is not yet fully clear and there are a bunch of potential paths (stealth addresses, dedicated L3 private blockspace, native privacy in EVM), so we need to do some more in-depth research to figure out the right path, then start executing.

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shazow pfp

How are you thinking regarding what "compliance" looks like for a Base privacy pool? Would Coinbase still require to have a viewing key for all transactions, or would you shoot for more ambitious privacy guarantees with ZK proofs that Coinbase can be otherwise blind to transactions that are presumed to be innocent? (Totally understand that this is subject to change and dependent on available technology at the time, but curious to hear about the level of aspiration at least.)

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jesse.base.eth 🔵 pfp

jesse.base.eth 🔵

we haven't started work on it yet, so i can't speak to what exactly we'll build, that said i've been pretty inspired by @ameensol's work on privacy-pools and i like to think we could get to full privacy with something like those opt-in and opt-out sets to manage compliance. that said, lots of work to do to actually figure out how to bring this to life.

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Zayner pfp

Love that ur looking into privacy 💙 Would love your thoughts on a “pass through” address. I’ve noodled on the idea of a proxy address where transactions can be routed through. With a large volume set, the router provides simple onchain obfuscation, while meeting compliance reqts. I would love to know how you’re thinking about hiding *account balances*, because what’s holding me (and likely many larger holders) back from a base name is someone seeing my entire portfolio.

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shazow pfp

In practice, shuffling transactions through a fully transparent ledger is ineffective. Our tooling has gotten too good, that even amateurs can trace it using publicly-available explorers now. The other options are pooled addresses: 1. Centralized intermediary pools like running transactions through Coinbase to decouple trail (but revealing it to Coinbase and possibly leaking everything someday), 2. Onchain pools like Tornado Cash and Privacy Pools (more compliance-friendly approach). More here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4563364

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