Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong took to X on Wednesday afternoon to boast about how much of his firm’s “daily code” is generated by AI or “vibe coded,” and what followed was a series of scathing critiques about the potential fragility of a company that holds a significant amount of the industry’s institutional crypto assets.
(Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wants his firm to vibe code most of its software by October 2025 / Brian Armstrong on X)
The $80 billion company is America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and has been entrusted with the custody of digital assets for almost all crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
“Eight of the top 10 publicly traded companies with BTC on their balance sheet use Coinbase Prime,” Armstrong wrote in June. “There’s $140B of crypto in US ETFs, and 81% of that is stored with Coinbase,” he added. The company also “proudly serves as the custodian for 9 out of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs and 8 out of 9 ETH ETFs,” according to its website.
Coinbase’s dominance in the space is so extensive that many have called Coinbase a centralized threat to the entire industry. “Most bitcoin ETFs plan to custody their bitcoin at Coinbase, wrote Gabor Gurbacs, former director of digital asset strategy at investment firm VanEck and founder of Pointsville. “This is good business for Coinbase … It’s also an enormous responsibility and pooling of counterparty risk.”
Yet despite the potentially catastrophic ramifications of deploying AI-generated software, the company is pushing forward with vibe coding what may be the most critical infrastructure in crypto. To be fair, Coinbase’s engineering team has put a lot of thought into safety and risk management while taking advantage of what by all appearances, seems to be an inevitability; the replacement of humans with machines in fields such as software development, writing, and design.
“AI is on track to eclipse human-generated code at Coinbase by the end of the year,” the company said in a recent blog post. “This has enabled profound success stories that weren’t possible 12 months ago, like single engineers refactoring, upgrading or building new codebases in days instead of months.”
Enter Sean Cook, a University of Connecticut Marketing graduate who took a six-month programming course at the University of Berkley in 2019 and later launched the now infamous “Tea” app in 2023. Tea is a female-only application that allows women to share private details about men they meet on dating apps under the guise of “safety.”
(Sean Cook, founder of the Tea app took a 6-month programming course but later confessed that he cannot code. Many believe Tea’s glaring security flaws were the result of low-quality AI-generated software.)
The former Salesforce product manager says he was inspired to create Tea after witnessing his inexperienced 60-something-year-old mother struggle with online dating. She dealt with catfishing and sometimes unwittingly matched with beguiling Casanovas seeking one-night stands.
But Cook, who, despite taking a programming course, confessed that he doesn’t even know how to code during a podcast interview earlier in the year, later found himself in hot water after Tea was hacked and sensitive user information was stolen and dumped onto the public web. The culprit? AI-generated code, at least that’s what his many detractors allege, although Cook claims two engineers in Brazil are responsible for developing the app. His firm is now facing up to ten class action lawsuits, according to NBC.
Other high-profile vibe coding blunders include the scandal surrounding the Swedish website-building app Lovable. Reporting by Futurism says that Lovable’s AI-generated code had such poor security, that it allowed “practically anyone to access critical information about the site’s users, including names, email addresses, and even financial information.”
What could possibly go wrong if Coinbase’s wallet infrastructure suffers from a cybersecurity failure even remotely close to what happened at Tea and Lovable?
“‘The code is AI-generated’ is a codename for ‘nobody actually knows how any of it works,’” writes Android developer Gabor Varadi, who says he has been coding for more than a decade. “So if you are using Coinbase, this should make you wonder if your money is safe in an app that nobody ever truly understood and is mostly random snippets pasted together from random text.”
Bitcoin.com reached out to both Coinbase and Tea, but neither had responded at the time of publication.
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