Coinbase unveils CDP Wallets offering 'full control' without key management

Crypto exchange giant Coinbase has introduced CDP Wallets, a new developer-focused wallet infrastructure designed to eliminate the long-standing tradeoff between custody and complexity. 

Coinbase argues that developers either had to manage private keys themselves and deal with complex operations or rely on custodians and give up flexibility.

Now available in open beta, CDP Wallets seeks to address this, giving developers "full control" to create self-custodied, programmable wallets via API without managing private keys or infrastructure, Coinbase said in a statement shared with The Block. Instead, CDP Wallets use Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to secure sensitive operations inside AWS Nitro Enclaves, ensuring unencrypted private keys are never exposed — not even to Coinbase.

Unlike traditional externally owned accounts (EOAs) or multi-party computation (MPC) wallets, developers interact solely through scoped API credentials, enabling them to define smart transaction policies and automate execution without running their own signer setups. "You create, sign, and manage transactions entirely through scoped API calls: no MPC, no key shards, no infrastructure to deploy," Coinbase said.

Key features include instant wallet creation, low-latency signing, and integration with popular developer tools like viem, wagmi, and ethers.js. CDP Wallets support EVM chains, Solana, and EIP-712 typed message signing, enabling structured interactions with smart contracts and making them ideal for real-time DeFi bots, onchain AI agents, payments infrastructure, and enterprise treasury systems, the team claimed. U.S. developers can also earn 4.1% USDC rewards natively on idle CDP Wallet balances, with no staking or lockups required.

"The next generation of onchain systems need wallets that are programmable, policy-enforced, and invisible to the end user," Coinbase said. "CDP Wallets make that possible … simple, fast, and ready for production."