Base App Redesign at Coinbase

In 2024 I was the frontend engineer leading the redesign of the Coinbase Wallet app, now the Base app. It was a company priority: rebuild the app around discovery and engagement, and make someone's assets easier to look at.

I worked closely with my designer and my product manager through the whole project, agreeing on the requirements and the designs together.

What I built

• A new Home screen. It replaced the old assets-first screen and took in the Explore content, with a new header for search, scan, and inbox.
• A new Wallet tab, which replaced Settings as a top-level tab.
• Label-free bottom tab navigation, reordered to Home, Browser, Transactions, Wallet.
• Sticky tabs, so the app opens on the last tab someone used, even after a restart.
• A stacked portfolio for crypto, NFTs, and DeFi, each with its own screen behind a "see all".
• Screens for empty wallets and for new users getting started.
• A rebuilt messaging screen that splits messages from requests.
• Every deeplink in the app, rebuilt. The new structure broke all of them, and nobody had planned for that.
• The analytics. I set up the events for the new screens, so we could judge the rollout on numbers instead of opinions.

What it took

Each tab in the app belonged to a different team, and my work touched almost all of them. Shipping meant learning each team's codebase, then talking to them so everyone knew what was changing across the app and agreed on one direction. Every change went out behind feature flags and kill switches.

I had to learn the stack while building on it. React Native and Web3 were both new to me when I started.

Shipping a mobile app is not the same as shipping a website. Releases go out on a fixed cycle, dedicated testers check a build before it leaves, and once it is out you cannot just push a fix. Anything urgent enough to skip the cycle went out as an over-the-air update instead.

Impact

We rolled it out in stages instead of turning it on for everyone at once. At each step we checked that the new version was not worse than the old one.

It was faster than what it replaced. We checked that through employee dogfooding before it reached customers, and against production metrics after it did.

Where to see it

It is still in production. A newer version has shipped since, but you can switch back to the old UI inside the Base app, and that one is mine. It runs on both iOS and Android, because Base is built with React Native.

Later that year I worked on the follow-up release too, adding the long-press wallet switcher, the avatar picker, a new theme, Lottie animations, and the day-change percentages on the assets screen. I also found an accessibility problem in our design system's colors and got design, product, and engineering to agree on one palette.