Our industry has come a long way since Satoshi’s white-paper. Bitcoin has become a household name and an increasing percentage of the world’s population has access to cryptocurrencies. Fundamental breakthroughs in cryptography, permissionless consensus, and decentralized computation have opened up many new possibilities.

Cryptocurrencies and decentralized protocols will underpin an open financial system that brings greater equality of opportunity to the world. We at Coinbase have been hard at work connecting people to these networks by building secure, easy to use products. But there is a long way to go, and building an open financial system isn’t something we can do alone.

This is why we’re formally announcing the Coinbase Protocol team. Our mission is to contribute to community-led projects which will move our industry forward. We’ve been looking at projects like payment channels, off-chain computation, trustless light clients and proof-of-stake blockchains. We want to promote collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas by working with different development teams. Over the past year, we’ve made a number of public contributions, including work on a new light client protocol for Bitcoin to support the Lightning Network.

We’re looking for talented engineers with great ideas, who share our vision. If you’re interested in working with a distributed team on the future of financial protocols, we’re hiring!