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Documentation and API access are provided to partners during onboarding. If you’re interested in using the Customers product, get in touch and our team will follow up to discuss fit.
The Customers product lets you onboard your users to Coinbase, giving them access to crypto payments, trading, and custody, under your own brand. Standing up an end-to-end crypto compliance program takes significant time and resources: identity verification, sanctions screening, fraud protection, ongoing monitoring, and regulatory coverage. The Customers product gives you direct access to Coinbase’s compliance infrastructure, so you can quickly launch crypto products without building the compliance infrastructure from scratch. You own the customer experience. Coinbase powers the compliance infrastructure. Your customers get access to the crypto economy.

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How it works

You manage the customer relationship, collect their information, surface any steps they need to complete, and check what they’re authorized to do before initiating an operation. Coinbase runs the underlying compliance program, verifying identities, running sanctions screening, making compliance determinations, and monitoring your customers on an ongoing basis.

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Initial and ongoing compliance

When a customer first onboards, Coinbase runs a full compliance review (identity verification, sanctions screening, and due diligence) before any capability is activated. Compliance doesn’t stop at onboarding. Coinbase continuously monitors your customers over time, rescreening against updated watchlists, reviewing activity for unusual patterns, and collecting compliance events as they occur.

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Capabilities

A customer’s actions are built around a set of capabilities: specific actions your customers can take, from holding a balance to sending a transfer to placing a trade. Each capability has a set of requirements associated with it. When you submit a customer’s information, Coinbase evaluates it against those requirements and returns which capabilities are active, which are pending, and what’s still needed to unlock others. See the Capabilities page for the full list and what each one requires.
Use Customers when you need to enable custody, transfers, or trading on behalf of an end-user.

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Core objects

The API is built around three objects you’ll interact with throughout a customer’s lifecycle:
ObjectDescription
CustomerYour end-user, with their submitted identity information and compliance state
CapabilityA specific action (e.g., custodyFiat, transferCrypto) and whether it is unrequested, pending, active, or inactive for a customer
RequirementA field or action a customer must complete to unlock a capability (e.g., submit identity information, accept Terms of Service)

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Next steps

Customers

Customer object reference, lifecycle, and Terms of Service

Capabilities

All capabilities, statuses, and how to check them

Requirements

How to resolve outstanding requirements and unblock customers