The Coinbase Blog

Coinbase Launches Subscription Payments

We’ve been working on subscription/recurring payments for quite some time, and today they are launching in beta!  Recurring payments are an important addition to our merchant tools and something that a number of merchants have requested.

Recurring payments are necessary for a ton of services - anything where you periodically receive a bill.

Some examples include:

• Publication subscriptions
• Collecting rent
• Maid services
• Ride sharing
• Gym memberships
• Recurring donations
• And many more

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Our PHP Library Has Launched

We’re pleased to announce that the Coinbase PHP library has launched!

This library makes it even easier for PHP developers to integrate bitcoin into their web applications.

Special thanks goes to Isaac Waller for putting the library together!

This is our second official client library for the API.  The first being the ruby library.  We also have community contributed libraries in Python and NodeJS.

As always, feel free to fork, contribute, and send us feedback on the library (using GitHub issues).

Humble Bundle now accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase bitcoin merchant tools

Humble Bundle, known for its flash sales of millions of $s worth of games from high quality developers, is now accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase merchant tools.  You can check out the newly released bundle of games here.

Humble Bundle has always been about the strong link between great game developers and the people that love them.  Fundamentally, Bitcoin is a great match, as it allows direct payment for these games from anywhere in the world with far lower fees.

In addition, since base fees on transactions are so low in Bitcoin, it makes small purchases viable where credit card fees used to make them painful. Take a $0.99 app purchase as an example - credit cards will often charge a base fee of $0.15 or more.  All of a sudden that’s 15% of revenue (and an even higher % of profit!) out the door in payment processing costs.  We think Bitcoin will enable businesses doing small $ transactions to exist where they couldn’t before because such fees are so prohibitive.  We wouldn’t be surprised to see music artists use Bitcoin in the “pay what you want” method for a new album soon.

Coinbase Now Processing $15M Per Month In Bitcoin Buys and Sells

Back in February we announced that over $1M USD worth of bitcoin was being bought and sold each month on Coinbase.

Here we are a little less than 3 months later and we’re now doing $15M USD per month of bitcoin buys and sells.

Growth has been heavily constrained also, as you’ve noticed if you’ve seen the “sorry we’ve reached the maximum number of buys for today” message.  Most days we’ve been reaching our maximum amount of buys within an hour or two.  Some fixes for that are in the works.

Suffice to say, awareness about bitcoin is growing quickly!

Varsity Tutors Starts Accepting Bitcoin Using Coinbase

Varsity Tutors is the latest in a line of traditional (non-tech) businesses who has started accepted bitcoin.  VarsityTutors offers private in-home tutoring in 19 cities across the U.S., helping high school and college-aged students improve their test scores and studies.

They might have won the award for fastest integration, which took just a few hours.  And they are now reaping the benefits of lower transaction fees in their business.

Adding bitcoin as another payment option right along side credit cards and bank transfers is becoming an increasingly easy proposition.

Heyzap Has Started Paying Game Developers In Bitcoin Using Coinbase

Payments on mobile is an exciting use case for bitcoin since micro-transactions (less than $1) don’t work well with credit cards.

Credit cards have a base fee of about $0.30, so for a small purchase (say $1) this can be a 30% transaction fee.  This is also why you see so many signs that say “$10 minimum on credit card” etc at various retailers.

Heyzap completed an integration with Coinbase last week to both (1) fund your account in bitcoin and (2) get paid out in bitcoin.  We think mobile will be an exciting use case for bitcoin going forward, especially amongst game developers.

OKCupid starts accepting Bitcoin using Coinbase!

We’re proud to announce you can now find true love with Bitcoin by using OKCupid!  This is one more step forward for bringing Bitcoin to the masses - one date at a time.

Olaf Carlson-Wee Joins Coinbase For Customer Support

With our rapid growth we’ve seen an increasing volume of support requests (one every 4 minutes currently!) and we spent a good bit of time searching for the right first full time hire for customer support.

Olaf impressed us with his bitcoin knowledge, enthusiasm, and desire to build a strong community around bitcoin.  He recently finished his degree in Sociology at Vassar College where he wrote his thesis on Bitcoin (available for publication soon).  He is also an excellent rock climber!

Please welcome Olaf to the team!  We’ll be continuing to hire for customer support as things ramp up.

Data On Merchant Pages

Some posts circulated earlier today about a possible data breach at Coinbase.  I wanted to provide some more information about what happened and how we’re responding.

Update: The Washington Post and Ars Technica, who incorrectly reported that “transaction data” had been leaked, have now posted corrections to their articles.  We appreciate them correcting this error.

What data was shown publicly?

Merchants who created a “buy now” button, donate button, or payment page on Coinbase, and posted a public link to it, had this page publicly visible on the internet.  The page contained merchant data that was entered in the Company Profile section.

But it also contained the merchant’s email address.  Product pages are meant to have public information about the merchant, but including the merchant’s email address had unintended consequences in this case, and should not have happened. (more on this below)

Was my email address leaked?

Not unless you created a “buy now”, donate, or hosted payment page using our “Merchant Tools” and posted a public link to it on the internet.

Was any other data leaked?

No.  There wasn’t any transaction data, customer data, or anything else leaked.  

How did this happen?

This was our fault in several ways.  We should not have included the merchant email addresses on payment pages unless our merchants were made more explicitly aware of this.  Also (and perhaps more importantly) we did not take care to prevent these pages from being indexed in public search engines like Google.  This allowed anyone to search for public Coinbase merchant payment pages, and to collect the email addresses of merchants off these pages in an automated way.

In particular, we believe this was the source of the emails from the phishing attack yesterday.

What are you going to do to make it right?

First, we have corrected the source of the problem by:

• removing email addresses from merchant payment pages
• updating our robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing these pages in the future
• requesting that Google remove the cached version of these pages through their webmaster tools

Second, to correct the damage done, we have reimbursed the affected users from the phishing attack for any funds lost.  It appears only two users were affected by this so far, but we will monitor it over the coming days to ensure there were not any others.

I’m personally very sorry for any trouble/anxiety this may have caused our customers, and I want you to know that we are working hard to make it right.  We’ll continue to update this page as more information becomes available.  As always you can reach us with comments or questions on our support forum.

Brian Armstrong
CEO, Coinbase

Beware of a phishing attack

If you received an email claiming to be from Coinbase - always be careful to check that the URL in your browser shows https://coinbase.com

A phishing attack email went out recently (subject line “Recent updates and transactions”) asking users to sign in.  The link in the email takes you to a page not on https://coinbase.com in an attempt to collect your username and password.

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