Whatever customers Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) has remaining could get excited about a new hire from the crypto exchange. The Block reports the company has hired Luke Youngblood to work on their custodial products.
The Block gets their information from a memo reportedly sent out to clients. Youngblood is expected to build products related to staking and governance. The memo stated, “These new products will provide Coinbase Custody clients with the ability to interact seamlessly with crypto-networks while maintaining the upmost security of their assets in Custody.”
Youngblood formerly worked for Amazon Web Services as their principal solutions architect. He’s also the founder and chief technical officer of Blockscale, a crypto firm.
Staking solutions, which Youngblood will help improve, allow investors to earn interest on their holdings while it sits in a custodial service. This relies of a proof of stake concept (POS), which Dr. Craig Wright has recently advised as a concept that should be avoided, as it simply isn’t decentralized and does not rely on the blockchain as its method of proof.
Still, for crypto investors that don’t know better, Coinbase offering another method for them to increase their profits could seem enticing. That is, if they have any investors who haven’t left them for the competition.
Coinbase is still struggling with the #DeleteCoinbase campaign, a social media campaign urging users to quit the crypto service over concerns that the company has hired firms that sell user data to corporations and the government.
After failing to quell user outrage with their first couple of explanations, Coinbase has now come out with a more fine-tuned message, indicating that even if they did share user data, none of it was “personally identifiable” to their customers.
Trying to distance themselves from Coinbase’s mess, two of Coinbase’s partners have also come forward to refute allegations that they were selling user data gained from the exchange. Elliptic and Chainalysis, two blockchain analysis companies tied to the exchange, have both adamantly stated they only analyzed the blockchain for fraudulent transactions, and were not provided with specific user data.
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