On-chain researcher: Coinbase uses MPC to split private keys, making it difficult for hackers to attack

On-chain researcher Zeeme posted a lengthy analysis on X, explaining why hackers can attack Binance, Bybit, and Bitget, but find it difficult to breach Coinbase. He stated that Coinbase holds approximately 959,000 BTC, worth about $10.33 billion, and has not suffered such attacks in 14 years.

Zeeme indicated that most exchanges concentrate billions of dollars in a few hot wallets for quick withdrawals; Coinbase, on the other hand, employs multi-party computation (MPC) technology, where the complete private key never exists on disk or in memory. Each key is split into shards upon generation and stored on isolated hardware chips.

He compared that in October, after hackers compromised a DevOps personnel's computer at Binance and hijacked hot wallet signatures, they transferred approximately $6.36 billion within 20 minutes; whereas at Coinbase, even if they breach an engineer's computer, they can only obtain a useless shard of the key.

Additionally, Zeeme later corrected that the approximately 69.8 million addresses mentioned in the post are Coinbase's deposit addresses, not the wallets holding funds, as Coinbase also has both hot and cold wallets.