On Feb 26, 2020, the crypto trading platform Coinbase introduced a new way for its wallet app users to transfer cryptocurrency via short, human-friendly addresses. The end result will resemble sending crypto to an email address.

Every Coinbase Wallet user has an associated username beginning with the (@) symbol that can now serve as an address so they can easily receive transfers from other users of the app instead of their full-length crypto address.

Of course, the feature only works if the address in question has registered a name with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).

Right now, ETH has about 88 million addresses, but users have only registered 133,000 ENS addresses—meaning that ENS adoption is far from universal.

This new feature is compatible with all the currencies already supported by Coinbase Wallet, including BTC, BCH, ETH, and ripple’s XRP.

For users with privacy concerns, the wallet app has been upgraded with a new privacy toggle in the settings menu so they can keep the username private and prevent other users from searching for it.

Coinbase New Wallet Feature to Drive Adoption

The developers of the Coinbase Wallet app believe that these improvements will make cryptocurrency much easier to use and thus help drive adoption by a more mainstream audience.

With the Coinbase Wallet experience, users can now easily send money to friends and business associates like they do with traditional payment apps, albeit globally and in crypto.

In fact, Sid Coelho-Prabhu, Product Lead for Coinbase Wallet, reiterated how stressful it is to send money with the fear of users having copied and pasted addresses incorrectly. He believes that the key to solving the issue of transferring crypto is using Human readable addresses.

Coelho-Prabhu added that his team was pleased to allow users to integrate a short, human-readable name with their crypto addresses into their Coinbase Wallet.

Ethereum Name Service Gaining More popularity

ENS is an open-source project managed by a non-profit organization, which is supported mainly by grants from the ETH Foundation.

So far, ENS has earned support from several wallets and blockchain projects, with a recent update from the Ethereum Name standard suggesting that over 50 crypto wallets have signed up to support the service.

Top wallets that presently support the ENS standard include MyEtherWallet, Burner Wallet, Binance’s Trust Wallet, Metamask, and Opera browser’s built-in ETH wallet. Moreover, upwards of 72 different apps support ENS.

As such, Coinbase’s recognition of ENS could provide significant publicity to the project and help drive crypto adoption to the general public.