This new Coinbase Wallet update is smart.
We've preached written about the importance of holding custody over your own digital assets (crypto, NFTs etc.) plenty of times in the past.
As a quick recap, in order to store your digital assets, you can:
Keep them on a trading platform like Mt. Gox, FTX, Coinbase or Binance (not recommended).
Keep them on a hot wallet.
Which is software that you have full control over, meaning your crypto is no longer on an exchange and entirely in your custody.
It's relatively safe, but anything that's constantly connected to the internet has it's vulnerabilities.
Put those bad boys onto a cold wallet.
Something like a Trezor or Ledger device. It's only connected while transferring your digital assets from online, to offline.
Super safe, but also pretty inconvenient.
It's common knowledge that you really shouldn't keep your crypto on an exchange.
So common, that Coinbase even created their own hot wallet - Coinbase Wallet - to let people take their crypto off of Coinbase and into their own custody.
Now, it seems Coinbase are doubling down on that product, in the interest of pushing adoption forwards (safely).
They've just released the following new features for Coinbase Wallet:
Transaction previews (sort of like a 'are you sure you want to do that??' alert before you make a transfer)
A blocklist of flagged dApps (fool one person with a scam, sucks for them, fool an entire crowd and it could impact the whole industry)
A spam token management feature (hide maliciously airdropped assets automatically)
While there's still a long way to go in order for the masses to store their crypto in self-custody wallets, big product updates like these that reduce scams are a good start!
