Coinbase updated its wallet with a function that lets its users send cryptocurrency through usernames, instead of the usual lengthy addresses.

Co-ordinate to a Feb. 25 proclamation, Coinbase Wallet now allows its users to ship cryptocurrency to dedicated usernames or ones created on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Coinbase's proprietary usernames look similar @username while ENS names resemble URLs similar coinbase.eth.

Source: Coinbase blog

No more than sending to a wrong address

In its proclamation, Coinabse claims that its users oftentimes complain about "how cumbersome it is to deal with long and nonsensical crypto addresses." Many users are oftentimes afraid of having copied and pasted addresses incorrectly and losing the funds. Those are the problems that username implementation attempts to solve, according to the company:

"Human-readable addresses help fix these problems. There are now services that let you acquaintance a short human-readable name with your crypto addresses. [...] We believe these improvements will make cryptocurrency much easier to use and assist drive adoption with a more than mainstream audience."

The Ethereum Name Service

The ENS is an Ethereum smart contract-based distributed naming system that attributes homo-readable names to cryptocurrency wallet addresses. At get-go, the organisation only allowed Ether addresses only in Oct 2022 it rolled out multicoin support.

ENS was launched in early May 2022. Names are sold for Ether (ETH) to users via a smart contract-managed on-concatenation auctions. During its early times it has seen lots of speculation by users who bought desirable names hoping that they could afterwards sell them at a profit.

The organisation had its share of problems. In October 2022, the ENS proper noun auctions were halted because of a bug that resulted in the names existence awarded to the wrong users and for lower bids. Malicious users have likewise exploited the bugs in the smart contracts for their own profit.