Customer Stories / Financial Services
2024

Coinbase Boosts Efficiency and Accelerates Development by Collaborating with AWS
Learn how Coinbase collaborates with AWS teams including AWS Professional Services to drive multiple cloud optimization initiatives.
50%
reduction in scaling time
62%
decrease in cloud infrastructure costs for migrated services
Increased
the iteration speed for developers
Overview
Coinbase is a trusted cryptocurrency platform that makes it easy for people and institutions to engage with crypto assets, including trading, staking, safekeeping, spending, and fast, free global transfers. To drive efficiency and cost optimization, Coinbase collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) teams including AWS Professional Services to implement multiple cloud migrations and initiatives. As part of this work, AWS experts embedded within Coinbase teams ensured a seamless and effective collaboration. As a result, Coinbase migrated critical application environments in half the time—years ahead of schedule— reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 62 percent, and increased iteration speed for developers.

Opportunity | Seeking Efficiency Gains for Sustainable Growth
Coinbase, founded in 2012, is the first and only publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, allowing customers to transact and interact securely within the onchain economy. From early on, Coinbase has run its business on AWS in support of its mission of building an open financial system for the world. Tiberiu Oprisiu, senior staff software engineer at Coinbase, shared, “We want to provide economic freedom for the rest of the world through cryptocurrency, and the only way that we’re going to achieve that is by onboarding more than one billion users to our platform. That requires having the right infrastructure in place to enable scalability and reliability, and AWS helps us do that.”
In 2022, Coinbase sought to increase efficiency and cost optimization in response to economic trends and growing customer needs. “We needed to focus on efficiency to be able to operate with positive margins during a down cycle where we had less revenue,” Oprisiu says. “We started looking into the initiatives we had available to us, but we realized we needed to bring in an outside team to quickly iterate through our backlog of projects so we could achieve our cost optimization targets. ”

With AWS Professional Services, we were able to horizontally scale our teams and significantly accelerate our migration to Amazon EKS. This collaboration has enhanced our scalability, reliability, and cost optimization efforts, allowing us to achieve critical goals more efficiently. ”
Tiberiu Oprisiu
senior staff software engineer, Coinbase
Solution | Driving Cloud Optimization with AWS
After researching options to enhance Coinbase scaling capabilities, Coinbase chose to expand its relationship with AWS by engaging experts from AWS Professional Services. To kick off this joint work, AWS Professional Services integrated with the Coinbase Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). The CCoE, formed in 2022 from a strategic collaboration with AWS, helps Coinbase reduce cloud costs and optimize business operations. Through the CCoE, Coinbase launched its 10X initiative, a complete redesign of network and account architecture.
After integrating with the CCoE, AWS Professional Services provided a holistic view of the Coinbase cloud landscape, resulting in the identification of high-value initiatives including a transition of the legacy Coinbase platform to AWS Graviton Processors running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for better performance and cost efficiency.
AWS Professional Services led a three-phase cloud optimization effort for Coinbase, beginning with the migration of the legacy Coinbase platform to AWS Graviton. “In the initial migration, AWS helped us design the architecture, roll out updates to our build pipeline, lead the migration, and validate and test the new environment,” says Oprisiu. In the second phase, AWS Professional Services led a migration of legacy Coinbase Auto Scaling groups to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This phase allowed Coinbase to automate scaling and resource management across its applications. The third phase involved moving the Coinbase 10X environment to AWS Graviton-based workloads on Amazon EKS, targeting further cost optimization and improved performance. By leveraging AWS Graviton, Coinbase could achieve higher efficiency and better processing power, supporting its long-term growth and innovation objectives.
To better align frameworks, Coinbase rewrote the CCoE core mission to focus on three pillars within the AWS Well-Architected Framework: cloud architecture of excellence, cloud usage excellence, and cloud lifecycle management.
“We’ve used the AWS Well-Architected Framework to change our core mission and focus more on cloud optimization and efficiency, and we’re also relying on AWS Professional Services for help in how we should think about our build and orchestration pipelines,” says Dr. Adam Link, engineering manager at Coinbase.
Throughout engagement with Coinbase, AWS experts quickly integrated into the Coinbase culture. “The easy integration into our culture really speaks to the professionalism of the AWS teams,” Dr. Link says. “Several AWS engineers developed strong cultural and technical expertise, enabling them to onboard new Coinbase employees into the AWS Cloud environment.”
Coinbase also benefitted from AWS Enterprise Support, which provides 24/7 support, AWS Incident Detection and Response, automation tools, and planning and advisory services. “AWS Enterprise Support helps us ensure there are no issues before we launch new services or products,” says Oprisiu.
Outcome | Achieving Cost Savings, Scalability, and Innovation Faster
Coinbase sharpened its strategy by collaborating with AWS experts and aligning with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. “AWS Professional Services is our force multiplier, enabling our relatively small team to make a large impact across the company,” says Oprisiu. “With AWS Professional Services, we were able to horizontally scale our teams and significantly accelerate our migration to Amazon EKS. This collaboration has enhanced our scalability, reliability, and cost optimization efforts, allowing us to achieve critical goals more efficiently.”
Furthermore, by collaborating with AWS, Coinbase was able to achieve its migration goals more quickly. Coinbase led a significant and complex effort, working with AWS Professional Services to successfully transition to an Amazon EKS-based orchestration layer—a move completed in half the time originally anticipated. "Conducting a complete lift and shift of an orchestration layer is challenging and time-consuming, but working with AWS Professional Services enabled us to achieve this milestone much faster than anticipated," says Dr. Link. This collaboration allowed Coinbase to focus on its long-term strategic vision rather than short-term goals, positioning the company for sustained growth and innovation in the competitive financial technology landscape.
Since 2022, Coinbase has reduced its operating costs by 62 percent, a significant achievement attributed to following AWS best practices and the AWS Well-Architected Framework. With a reallocation formula, Coinbase reinvests each dollar saved into new products and growth opportunities.
By migrating to Amazon EKS, Coinbase can scale its application environment 50 percent faster, ensuring it can efficiently meet future demands. For example, during high-traffic events like a Bitcoin ETF launch, Coinbase can centrally manage resources by overprovisioning at the cluster level, avoiding the need for individual teams to manually update settings. This streamlined approach simplifies resource management, allowing for smoother scaling and optimized performance across the entire infrastructure. Running on AWS further enhances reliability, with AWS teams providing rapid resolution for any issues.
Through its collaboration with AWS experts, Coinbase has increased the speed of its product and feature development. This achievement stems from Coinbase's improved capability to build, deploy, and execute more efficiently on Amazon EKS, facilitated by AWS Professional Services' support for multi-architecture builds.
Coinbase is better positioned to fulfill its mission of increasing economic freedom globally. “Our goal is to increase economic freedom in the world, and there are numerous studies that show that increased economic freedom actually leads to a higher quality of life and longevity for individuals,” says Dr. Link. “AWS provides us with uptime, scalability, and reliable transaction capabilities on our platform, but it’s about more than that—it’s about helping people live better lives.”
About Coinbase
Crypto creates economic freedom by ensuring that people can participate fairly in the economy, and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is on a mission to increase economic freedom for more than 1 billion people. Coinbase is updating the century-old financial system by providing a trusted platform that makes it easy for people and institutions to engage with crypto assets, including trading, staking, safekeeping, spending, and fast, free global transfers. It also provides critical infrastructure for onchain activity and support builders who share its vision that onchain is the new online. And together with the crypto community, Coinbase advocates for responsible rules to make the benefits of crypto available around the world.

AWS Services Used
AWS Professional Services
The AWS Professional Services organization is a global team of experts that can help you realize your desired business outcomes when using the AWS Cloud.
Learn more »
AWS Enterprise Support
AWS Enterprise Support provides a comprehensive suite of resources, including proactive planning, advisory services, automation tools, communication channels, and 24/7 expert support.
AWS Well-Architected Framework
AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud and on-premises data centers.
Get Started
Organizations of all sizes across all industries are transforming their businesses and delivering on their missions every day using AWS. Contact our experts and start your own AWS journey today.