Coinbase Acquires Utopia Labs Team to Accelerate Onchain Payments Roadmap

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has acquired the Utopia Labs team to accelerate its onchain payments roadmap within Coinbase Wallet.

“The Utopia team has been on the ground floor building onchain payments products for years,” Jesse Pollak, head of Base and Coinbase Wallet at Coinbase, wrote in a Wednesday (Nov. 13) post on the company’s blog. “We’re pumped for them to join us to accelerate our goal of bringing low-cost, fast and global payments to everyone around the world.”

In a message on the homepage of the Utopia Labs website, the company’s co-founders wrote that they are joining Coinbase and that the Utopia Labs products would be shut down Wednesday.

They added that they had focused on accelerating the future of onchain payments over the past three years and found “perfect alignment” with Coinbase’s goal.

“Over the past 3 years, we’ve shipped over 5+ products that all focused on the north star of accelerating onchain payments, and we’re excited to be shipping great products at Coinbase,” they wrote.

Pollak wrote in the Coinbase blog post that improving the user experience is crucial as stablecoins continue to grow.

“Together, we’ll create a future where individuals and businesses large and small use onchain payments to make their lives better every day,” Pollak wrote.

Coinbase’s third-quarter earnings results suggested that the use of crypto for speculation is waning, while the utility of crypto within payments is waxing, PYMNTS reported Oct. 31.

“Where our focus has been is building the infrastructure to create an environment where payments will be 10 times better than current options,” Coinbase Chief Financial Officer Alesia Haas said Oct. 30 during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Haas added that Coinbase’s “goal is that actually every finance, every FinTech company, will eventually become a crypto company.”

On Oct. 30, Coinbase and Visa announced that they launched a money movement partnership that connects Coinbase to the Visa Direct network, letting the exchange’s customers deposit funds into their accounts via eligible Visa debit cards.

This new feature allows for real-time delivery of account funds, giving Coinbase users more opportunities to take advantage of trading opportunities, Coinbase said in a press release.