On-chain researcher: Coinbase splits private keys using MPC, making them harder for hackers to target

On X, on-chain researcher Zeeme published an in-depth analysis explaining why Binance, Bybit, and Bitget have all suffered recent hacks—while Coinbase has maintained a zero-incident record for 14 years. He notes that Coinbase currently holds approximately 959,000 BTC in custody—valued at $103.31 billion. In contrast, most exchanges prioritize withdrawal speed by concentrating billions of dollars’ worth of assets in just a few hot wallets. Coinbase, however, builds its foundational security architecture on Multi-Party Computation (MPC): complete private keys are never written to disk or held in memory; instead, they’re split into multiple shards at generation time and stored separately across physically isolated, purpose-built hardware chips. Zeeme further supports his argument with a recent incident: in October, hackers breached the terminal of a Binance DevOps engineer, seized control of hot wallet signing permissions, and transferred roughly $6.36 billion in assets within 20 minutes.