rob
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Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command. It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards. Automated snapshots were gone too. In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I changed so this doesn't happen again. If you use Terraform (or let agents touch infra), this is a good story for you to read. alexeyondata.substack.com/p/how-i-droppe…
Singing > watching. So we got millions of people watching the Big Game to sing along with us. Oh, and we put it on the world's largest LED screen @SphereVegas.
Tl;dr: We’re focusing the Base app to be trading-first to drive demand and distribution for every asset and to be the best app for whatever you do in the onchain economy. Since announcing the Base app in July, hundreds of thousands of you have used the app to create, trade, save, spend, and build. Seeing the adoption has been incredible. We've also heard clear feedback about what's landing and isn't. Three themes stand out: - The app felt overly focused on social. It came across as too close to web2, and didn’t show support for the full breadth of assets that people want to trade. - Everyone wants more high quality assets. In general there is a desire to engage with and trade high quality assets. This is the most important opportunity as we bring capital markets onchain. - The feed needs to surface everything: Having a feed of what's happening onchain is a good idea, but it needs to surface apps, stocks, predictions, and every asset class (with social tokens are just one of many). In a world where everything is tokenized and tradeable, the single most valuable thing we can do is drive demand and distribution to everyone. That’s exactly what the Base app is going to do. We’re going to make the Base app the best place to trade and use every asset. Concretely this means: 1. We’re going to build for trading first. Having trading as our primary focus will help us bring demand and capital for all rapidly growing asset classes in the economy. 2. We’re going to bring more high quality assets onchain. To best serve the trading use case, we’re going to make it so everything is tradable in the app — protocols, apps, stocks, predictions, memes, and yes creators too. We’re going to lean into a finance-first UX. We be 3. We’re going to lean into a finance-first UX. We believe it makes more sense to layer social features on top of finance, than the other way around. This means we'll continue to experiment with features like copy-trading, feed-trading, and leaderboards. This is going to be hugely additive to the Base economy because it's going to drive more capital and users to every asset and app. Base app will be the best self-custodial wallet to trade and use every asset, globally accessible, with fast, simple onboarding for everyone, everywhere. Base chain will continue to be the best chain to build anything, now supercharged with even more distribution. We’re building this together, in the open, and seeing how people use the app keeps teaching us what matters most. Thank you for the continued feedback. Stay based.
2025 @Coinbase: • Coinbase joined the S&P 500 - becoming the first crypto native company added to the index, marking a major milestone for mainstream adoption and cementing crypto’s place in global financial portfolios. • We closed 10 acquisitions in 2025, Coinbase’s most active year for Mergers & Acquisitions ever. This included @DeribitOfficial, marking the largest acquisition in crypto history, as well as @liquifi_finance & @echodotxyz, expanding Coinbase into a full-stack platform for crypto projects and investors covering everything from launch to fundraising to secondary trading. • Set a new record for the most assets listed in a single year on Coinbase, dramatically expanding access to crypto markets for users worldwide. • The SEC voluntarily dismissed its case against Coinbase, ending litigation. By successfully obtaining permanent dismissal, Coinbase precipitated an end to the SEC’s unlawful campaign against the crypto industry. • Crypto got real rules. 2025 marked a breakthrough year as the GENIUS Act set federal standards for stablecoins, and the CLARITY Act is aiming to advance market structure - giving the industry long-needed regulatory certainty, with Coinbase advocating for both. • Upgraded the U.S. trading stack with futures + perpetual futures - bringing more powerful trading to a cleaner, faster flow with access for more clients. • Secured MiCA approval in Europe, unlocking the ability to offer regulated crypto services across the entire EU under a single license and significantly expanding our global footprint. • @CoinbaseInsto continued to lead institutional crypto markets - launching 24/7 CFTC-regulated futures trading, introducing U.S.perpetual-style futures, enabling the first futures/spot cross-margin trading in crypto, and is crypto’s largest custodian with $300B assets under custody. • We reincorporated in Texas, aligning Coinbase with a more innovation-forward regulatory environment. • Announced Stock trading and Prediction Markets on Coinbase. • Launched the Coinbase One Card in the U.S., offering eligible members Bitcoin back on every purchase (terms apply). • Introduced crypto-backed loans on Coinbase, enabling users to borrow USDC against crypto collateral via @Morpho on @Base - already surpassing $1B in Bitcoin-backed loans, and recently launched Ethereum-backed loans too. • Rolled out integrated DEX trading in the Coinbase app, giving users access to millions of tokens from onchain markets on @Base and @Solana - expanding beyond the traditional crypto trading experience. • Token sales went live on Coinbase, bringing regulated early access to new digital assets back to retail users with a fair allocation model prioritizing smaller buyers, issuer lockups for transparency, including for U.S. users. • The @Baseapp, the everything app for social, trading, and payments, launched worldwide to anyone, anywhere. • @CBVentures made over 600 investments in projects on every major blockchain, hosted the first-ever Coinbase Alumni event for our 100+ CB alumni-turned-founders/builders, and launched the first investment group by a major exchange to support @Base builders on Echo. • Global stablecoins went onchain: @Base expanded beyond USD in 2025, launching 18+ local stablecoins across Asia-Pacific, LATAM, and Europe to support everyday payments in local currencies. • @Shopify integrated USDC payments at checkout via @Base, enabling global merchants to accept instant, low-cost onchain payments. • @Base reached Stage 1 decentralization - shipping permissionless fault proofs and a 10-member independent Security Council, reducing reliance on any single operator and giving users stronger guarantees that funds can always exit to Ethereum. • @CoinbaseDev introduced x402, an open payment standard that gives developers, and AI agents, native access to wallets and onchain payments, with Payments MCP and the CDP x402 Facilitator driving global adoption. 2025 was a year of relentless shipping and execution - from expanding what you can trade, to where and how the world trades it, we’ve been focused on building the foundation for the next era of finance. More assets. More access. More markets. One platform, for everything. Time for 2026.
Introducing The Invention Network Pre-Seed Investors
Coinbase migrated 3,500 services from EC2 to Amazon EKS and AWS Graviton, a project that resulted in: - 50% faster scaling and significant cost savings - 20% reduction in infrastructure costs - 68% reduction in resources used by migrated services
Complexities in international markets can cause manual QA to consume up to 20% of a country pod engineer's time. To fix this, we developed a bot leveraging AI to test new features and reduce manual QA by 95%. Here it is navigating our login flow ⬇️
We re-architected the payments flow for USDC on @Base, introducing real-time transaction streaming to optimize our send and receive latency. - USDC receive latency on Base is down 90% from 20s to ~1s - USDC send latency on Base is down 50% from 5.5s to ~2s
