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Overview

Custodial Wallets hold balances in one or more assets (for example USD, USDC, or other supported crypto) and act as the source or target for deposits, transfers, and payouts you orchestrate from your backend. Coinbase provides custody for assets in these accounts on behalf of your CDP entity. In current milestones, the focus is entity-owned accounts for treasury, settlement, and operational balances. Support for customer-owned accounts (balances attributed to your KYC-verified end users) is rolling out in line with the broader payments roadmap.

How accounts fit your integration

Typical flows build on three ideas:
  1. Create and name accounts to segment funds (for example per merchant, product line, or settlement bucket).
  2. Receive value using deposit destinations. Crypto deposit addresses are the supported path for inbound funds today. Fiat deposit destinations are in active development.
  3. Move value using transfers between accounts, to external onchain addresses, to linked Coinbase balances where supported, or through other supported rails.

Account ownership models

ModelWho owns the balanceTypical use
Entity accountYour CDP organizationCompany treasury, settlement pools, operational hot balances
Customer account (coming soon)Your end customer under an approved programPer-user balances, payouts, and disclosures where you need customer-level ledgering
For how customer identity and verification relate to future customer accounts, see Customers & KYC.

Supported assets and networks

Supported assets, networks, and settlement behavior depend on your entity configuration and environment. Use Supported networks and assets as the source of truth for what you can hold and move in each environment.

Core API operations

OperationWhat it does
Create accountPOST /v2/accounts — provision a new account (optional display name, optional idempotency header)
Get accountGET /v2/accounts/{accountId} — metadata such as type, owner, and timestamps
List accountsGET /v2/accounts — paginated accounts for your entity
List balancesGET /v2/accounts/{accountId}/balances — balances per asset
Get balance for assetGET /v2/accounts/{accountId}/balances/{asset} — single-asset balance detail
Authentication follows the same CDP API key and JWT model as the rest of the platform. See Authentication and Idempotency for request signing and safe retries.

Custodial wallets quickstart

Create an account in Sandbox and confirm balances with the API

Accounts API reference

OpenAPI-backed reference for account and balance endpoints

Sandbox: Accounts guide

Portal funding and curl examples for Sandbox accounts

Payments overview

How payment acceptance, transfers, and deposit destinations relate to accounts