Coinbase
Coinbase is one of the biggest and most recognizable cryptocurrency exchanges in the world currently, operating in around 32 countries. They list Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin. Coinbase was founded in July 2011 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. It is estimated to have over 13,300,000 active traders.
The company has announced recently that they had acquired a promising startup project Cipher Browser, which is a mobile ethereum wallet.
Cipher Browser
The project advertise itself as the first full-featured mobile dApp browser and wallet for Ethereum. Cipher allows you to interact with dapps powered by Ethereum on your mobile device and makes it easy for you to securely store, send and receive Ether and ERC20 tokens.
The project has met with a lot of positive feedback from various developers and people related to blockchain projects. For example, Co-creator of FarmVille, Amitt Mahajan said that “Cipher has the potential of becoming the Netscape of crypto”, while Robit Clart, CTO of OmiseGO was “super impressed by Cipher” and added that “The attention to detail and the whole app feel fantastic”.
Toshi
Coinbase was interested in getting this project, as they want to improve their own decentralized mobile browser, called Toshi. These two apps will be then integrated to get the best features from both of them. Moreover, Peter Kim, who is a founder of Cipher Browser, will become the new head of engineering at Toshi.
Toshi wants to provide instant global payments with a secure end-to-end encrypted chat for messaging, as well as the whole ecosystem to browse third party applications powered by Ethereum.
Rachel Horwitz, vide president for communications from Coinbase, said that:
“Given the similarity of our product visions, we’re happy to be joining forces with Pete, who will become head of engineering for Toshi along side Sid Coelho-Prabhu, Coinbase’s product lead for Toshi. In coming weeks, we’ll merge certain features of Cipher into Toshi.”