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Coinbase Holds Internal Hackathon On Electrum, Http & Xim

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:46 PM
Justin OConnell
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:46 PM

Coinbase held their second internal hackathon at the Coinbase HQ, the company announced yesterday, focusing on projects its workers do not normally work on.

The Bitcoin exchange acknowledged their team investigates “new behaviors that an open, global payment protocol can uniquely enable.”

The hackathon went on for 48-hours so the team could explore such new horizons.

Assigned to the hackathon were teams of Coinbase engineers, designers and business operations individuals. Their only requirement was they had to work outside the normal purview of their jobs and try new things.

“After a couple sleepless nights and lots of caffeine and Soylent, we gathered together and presented our projects,” the company stated in a blog post. 

Coinbase announced some of what they worked on, including a browser plugin for HTTP status code 402: payment required  and HTML tags; a  Slack bot  enabling the functionality “to reward coworkers with bits and is simple for any team to setup”; an implementation  of the Xim bitcoin exchange protocol; a visualization tool  for looking at local wifi networks; and, an Android app of the Electrum bitcoin wallet.

“Often times, things that begin as toys can end up transforming into products that change people’s lives,” Coinbase wrote in its blog. “We hope to see some of these projects develop further in the near future and also hope to see many others emerge.”

Coinbase is headquartered in San Francisco California and operates a Bitcoin exchange in 32 countries with bitcoin transactions and storage capacities in 190 countries worldwide.

The firm was enrolled in the summer 2012 Y Combinator program and in May 2013 received US $5 million Series A investment led by Fred Wilson. In December 2013, the company received a US $25 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital.

Coinbase made headlines last month when it unveiled its Bitcoin debit card via Shift Payments.

Featured image from Shutterstock.