Coinbase Pro

» see pro.coinbase.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Coinbase in 2015 had a problem with its own success. The consumer app was built for someone buying a hundred dollars of bitcoin for the first time, and it charged accordingly, with a spread wide enough to make anyone trading in volume feel robbed. So the company opened a second front door in January 2015 called Coinbase Exchange, and put a real matching engine behind it.

What you got was a screen that would have looked familiar to anyone who had ever used a broker terminal. A live order book down the middle with a candlestick chart beside it, and an order form where you picked limit or market and watched the maker fee start near zero. It ran on the same account and the same custody as the consumer app, with the training wheels off and the fees cut by an order of magnitude.

It was renamed GDAX in 2016, for Global Digital Asset Exchange, which sounded like something a bank would build and pleased nobody. In May 2018 Coinbase gave up on that and announced Coinbase Pro, with the cutover finished on 29 June and the old GDAX APIs left running until the end of that year. Under the third name it became the default American venue for anyone who wanted an order book without leaving a regulated exchange.

Coinbase never operated properly in Turkey. Trading here ran through BtcTurk and Paribu, on lira pairs Coinbase never listed, and the reason people used them was that you could move money in from a Turkish bank on a Tuesday afternoon. Pro's dollar order book and its US bank rails were the entire product, and neither was reachable from Ankara without an account somewhere else.

~ the record ~

~ three names ~

Each rename tracked what the company thought it was that year. Coinbase Exchange in 2015 was a startup saying out loud that it had built a real matching engine, and GDAX in 2016 was the same product auditioning for institutions in the season when everyone in crypto was trying to look like finance. The 2018 retreat to Coinbase Pro came after the retail boom, once it was clear the customer was a person with a laptop.

~ the reason given ~

Coinbase announced the phase-out in June 2022 and gave two reasons, both of which were true. The features had been duplicated across two products for years, so any change had to be built twice. And moving money between Coinbase and Coinbase Pro was its own small ritual that lost people at the door, since a customer with funds in the wrong half of the same company could not place the order they had come to place.

Advanced Trade was the answer: the same order book, the same fee schedule, put inside the main app and the main website. It shipped in stages through 2022 and 2023, absorbing Pro's functions one at a time until nothing was left on the other side.

~ the terminal itself ~

The last day was 20 November 2023. Login stopped working, deposits and withdrawals with it, and every balance was moved to the customer's main Coinbase account with no action required from anyone. As shutdowns in this industry go it was administratively boring, and the money all landed where it was supposed to.

What went with it was a piece of interface history. Pro was the screen a lot of people first saw a real order book on, with the depth chart filling in on both sides of the spread and a fee table that made you learn what a maker was. Plenty of them had never traded anything before and learned market microstructure from a crypto exchange, because that was the terminal that would take a two hundred dollar account.

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