Feature Friday: Coinbase Vaults
Vaults are the crypto equivalent of a savings account.
If you have crypto assets that you don’t plan to spend/send frequently, you can put them in vault and get increased security.
Coinbase has had a vault offering for Bitcoin for the past three years and they have now launched the same vault product for ETH and Litecoin.
It appears as an additional account in your Coinbase accounts screen:
With the vault, you get a 48 withdrawal period (so nobody can move funds out of your account for 48 hours) and multiple signers on a withdrawal.
You can have three signers and require all three to sign a withdrawal or you can set up five and require three of five to sign a withdrawal.
I like to keep some crypto assets in my wallet and the rest in a vault. It is more secure.
If you have crypto assets at Coinbase, I encourage you to set up vaults for them.
Comments (Archived):
Blockstack is now a PBC. nice move.
Albert and I have sat down and chatted the topic of custodianship and vaults for enterprise use. It’s a clearly a pressing need now.I should chat with Jesse Pollak (author of the product announcement) to see what the tech specs entail. Slightly interesting they don’t use the phrase “cold storage” (they say “offline”, which might be the same); I wonder whether the product is fine for individual holdings, but would it be adequate for those of institutions, even a hedge fund? Is it Xapo-level stuff with armed guards, bunkers, etc…PS: If anyone out there is working on this area, please contact me!
CONTRIBUTORS:How is the customer protected against a hacking breach?Is Coinbase offering Insurance against loss and if so how much, similar to FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is an independent insurance for banks that provides protection against loss of your insured deposits)
I have been meaning to create a vault for my eth, just did, thanks for the reminder…btw, If this is a screenshot to your account, mine is looking pretty sad in comparison 😉
That’s a screenshot from the Coinbase blog post. I’m not down for sharing my financials with the world 😉
Limits to transparency, heh.
hehe, thanks Fred, I knew, I saw it when I clicked to the coinbase blog post you link to. Like all my attempts to humor, you’ll laugh about it a few days later. 😉 Someone told me at work that my jokes were really good once they thought about them for a while. 🙂 Have a great weekend.
Maybe Jamie Dimon gets one soon!!!
http://www.zerohedge.com/ne…
They should have named Coinbase “Gringtotts” instead. http://www.insidethemagic.n…
Much needed! BTW – How does coinbase decide which crypto-currencies to support? And how much technical overhead is involved when a new one is added. There must be a step function because these vaults were delayed from the BTC vaults for quite some time.
@fredwilson:disqus Do you personally use the vault or hardware wallet like ledger, trezor?
he uses both and i have his recovery seeds for sale on ebay. the buy it now price is 100 btc, and no returns.
That’s some serious amount of coin you got there…
With the vault, you get a 48 withdrawal period (so nobody can move funds out of your account for 48 hours) and multiple signers on a withdrawal.What would concern me with this is that the delay wouldn’t allow me to respond to quickly changing market conditions. There should be a way, even at a cost, to shorten this delay by X hours.Also the fact that this is offered and labeled as ‘increased security’ implies that there is less security or questionable security with the default method. [1][1] It’s a bit like airlines deciding to charge a premium for certain seats on an airplane because they are safer in a crash or to charge a premium when you get to fly with a pilot with 30 years of experience. There is already a safety concern and the language is just exacerbating that.
Of course there’s less security with the normal storage method. Security often presents a tradeoff against convenience. Smart security policies allow users to choose different tradeoffs for different scenarios.If you think you might make a less-than-48-hour decision to liquidate your entire BTC stash, obviously the solution isn’t to weaken the vault for everyone else, but rather for you to not use the vault. In your case the tradeoff favors convenience of capricious access, and you’re willing to give up the additional security of a large part of your wealth.The strawman of safer airline seats is inaccurate and nonexistent.
Giving an additional method at extra cost does not weaken it for anyone else. If I was willing to pay $1000 to have the CEO personally approve (because I owned 10,000,000) what’s wrong with that.Stand by the example and no it’s not a ‘strawman’..
.The multiple authentications adds security. The 48 hours does not. Why?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
I would imagine that you get 48 hours to detect fraud before it becomes irreversible. Sounds like security to me, JLM…
Was glad to see this new development. Now all that is left to do is to add DASH which is actually at a higher market cap than LTC.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…Fiat currency has some unique things about it.Cheers.
What wallet do you usually use Fred?
I was making a joke-not referring to the functionality of Coinbase