69.8 million Coinbase addresses are for deposits… Private keys distributed via MPC

Coinbase ($COIN) clarified that the roughly 69.8 million addresses attributed to it are deposit addresses, not custody wallets, and that it secures customer assets using multi-party computation (MPC), which splits private keys into fragments so transactions are signed by combining partial signatures. On-chain researcher Zeeme compared Coinbase's key management with Binance's recent security breach on X on the 1st, arguing that hackers who hit Binance, Bybit, and Bitget would find Coinbase far harder to attack, since even a compromised employee computer would yield only one unusable key shard. The distinction matters because it reframes Coinbase's on-chain footprint as deposit infrastructure rather than concentrated custody, and positions MPC as a differentiator in exchange security after a string of high-profile exchange hacks. Watch for whether other major exchanges adopt MPC-style key sharding and for any further clarification on Coinbase's custody architecture.