Providing secure storage of bitcoin is one of the most important products we offer at Coinbase. In that vein, we’d like to mention some new security features that we’ve added:
Improved Offline Storage Of Bitcoin
As you may have read previously, we keep most customer bitcoin disconnected from the internet in what we call “cold storage”. Over the past few months, we have spent time improving both the security of those coins and the percentage of coins held offline.
First, we have implemented a key splitting scheme and geographically distributed the shared pieces to various safe deposit boxes and vaults around the world. This ensures that keyholders are never geographically located in the same place during the course of normal events, so there can’t be a single point of failure for compromise. It also ensures keys are protected against loss since the data is backed up with redundancy. For more on our cold storage security you can visit our security page.
Second, we have been able to increase the overall percentage of bitcoin stored offline. While previously we were able to keep approximately 90% offline, we are now able to keep as high as 97% of funds offline. The exact amount changes on a day to day basis, but this additional layer of security is important to use as broadly as we can.
January 15, 2014 at 02:57AM
