Coinbase Details Multiuser Access Design for Business Accounts

Coinbase outlined a multiuser account design that lets several people act for a business through services built for individual users, giving the company a way to add business access across its existing stack.

Coinbase’s earlier services used one user_id to identify both the person making a request and the account owner. The design allows that identifier to represent either an individual account or a business account. A business is associated with the existing ID of the person who opened it, called the primary user. Other members act on behalf of that identity, while each member’s own identity travels with the request for permission checks and attribution.

Coinbase considered adding a separate account ID across its services. That would have required changes to application programming interfaces, account lookups, stored trades, downstream events and existing records. The company instead kept the existing identifier and added a way for services to distinguish the account owner from the person taking an action.

A shared Go gRPC interceptor adapts the ownership identity within participating services and applies permission and audit rules. Coinbase brought the component to trading, funding, transfers, staking, lending and payments. The architecture also enabled the company to build Coinbase Business on its existing technology stack.

The engineering work includes continuous integration checks for permission and audit declarations, plus integration tests for filtered audit reads. Staging browser tests cover actions by two members of a business account. Separate monitoring tracks identity, permission and audit failures.

Teams can add multiuser access one customer journey at a time. The design describes account access and audit behavior within Coinbase’s services, with the shared interceptor handling the relevant rules in services that adopt it.