Coinbase simplified sending cryptocurrencies. Will we forget the complicated addresses?

Sending cryptocurrencies is quite annoying for many beginners. The addresses of wallets are written for computers, but they are confusing and complicated for people. Several companies are trying to solve this problem and Coinbase has made significant progress.

Coinbase Wallet has updated its functionality with the ability to send cryptocurrencies using the payee’s username instead of the usual lengthy address.

Coinbase Wallet used the Ethereum Name Service to do this. This allows you to send cryptocurrencies to an address in the form @username_name.

A simple animation of sending a Coinbase Wallet transaction to a wallet named walletfan.eth instead of the traditionally complicated address:

Coinbase claims that its customers have long complained of cumbersome, long and pointless cryptoadres. Many users were afraid that they would copy the address incorrectly or even manually overwrite it with faults, thereby losing their funds by mistake. Unlike banking services, cryptocurrency transactions are unchanged and in the event of a mistake no one will return anything.

“Addresses that are human-understandable can solve these problems. There are services that allow you to assign a human-readable short name to your cryptographic addresses. We are convinced that these improvements will simplify the use of cryptocurrencies and thus contribute to their wider adoption by the majority audience, ”explains Coinbase.

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) on which this feature works is an intelligent distributed system based on Ethereum smart contracts that assigns readable names to classic addresses. Initially, the service only supported Ethereum addresses, but since October 2019 it has also supported other blockchains. Coinbase states that at this point, it is possible for the Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, XRP, Stellar Lumens, Dogecoin, and all ERC20 tokens including USDC and DAI.

Summary

Cointelegraph pointed out that the development of ENS had problems. There were bugs in smart contracts that hackers tried to exploit for their own benefit. Problems also arose in connection with the auction of “more human addresses” for their cryptographic equivalents.