Coinbase has hired Luke Youngblood to develop “Mining 2.0” services like staking and provisioning resources.

The cryptocurrency world is one of constant innovation and evolution. Any new technology that seeks to rest on its laurels will quickly be surpassed by others. This same philosophy applies as well to businesses that deal with cryptocurrencies, such as exchanges. Coinbase is reportedly upping their game by hiring an experienced executive to oversee a slew of future new services.

Getting Fresh Blood with Youngblood

The San Francisco-based exchange has hired Luke Youngblood, who served as a principal solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). His hiring is to enable the exchange to offer staking and governance solutions.

According to a Coinbase memo:

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.

The memo added:

Luke is the founder and CEO of Blockscale, an early pioneer of blockchain and crypto technologies. In 2018, he helped launch the Tezos network by creating the staking infrastructure for the Tezos Foundation, becoming the largest decentralized proof of stake validator in the world overnight.

Staking and other “Mining 2.0” features are booming in popularity, so it makes sense for Coinbase to add such services to their platform.

Coinbase Letting Hacking Team Members Go

In other news, the exchange found itself the target of criticism when it bought Neutrino, a blockchain intelligence platform. It seems that members of Neutrino used to be part of Hacking Team, an Italian spyware vendor. Hacking Team sold monitoring tools to regimes that were oppressive, and the tools were used to curtail the activities and freedoms of dissidents and journalists.

After this news broke on social media, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, announced via a Medium post that members of Neutrino that had a connection to Hacking Team were being let go. In his words, they will “transition out of Coinbase.”

In his Medium post, he states:

However, we had a gap in our diligence process. While we looked hard at the technology and security of the Neutrino product, we did not properly evaluate everything from the perspective of our mission and values as a crypto company. We took some time to dig further into this over the past week, and together with the Neutrino team have come to an agreement: those who previously worked at Hacking Team (despite the fact that they have no current affiliation with Hacking Team), will transition out of Coinbase. This was not an easy decision, but their prior work does present a conflict with our mission. We are thankful to the Neutrino team for engaging with us on this outcome.

What do you think about Coinbase’s recent activities? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Pixabay, Flickr, and Depositphotos.