Coinbase details architecture behind 1.5 million reads per second
Coinbase outlines how its Users service scales identity workloads to over 1.5 million reads per second during volatile crypto market peaks.
Coinbase is pulling back the curtain on a major rebuild of the core Users service, the identity backbone that handles login, multi-factor authentication, security settings and account management.
The company says the redesigned system can now sustain more than 1.5 million reads per second at peak.
The Users service sits on the critical path for almost everything a customer does on Coinbase, which means it has to survive sudden traffic spikes triggered by crypto market swings while staying fast, available and correct even when multiple systems are writing to it at once.
To get there, Coinbase broke apart its monolithic GetUser API and replaced it with a mesh of smaller “Fragments.” Each Fragment bundles related user fields such as Addresses, PhoneNumbers or TaxID and exposes them through its own API and dedicated data store.
Coinbase paired this with change data capture events, Snowflake integration for offline analytics and a shift away from an internal Cache Router sidecar to native ValKey connections managed by Amazon Web Services.
The storage layer also received a structural overhaul. Coinbase adopted a federated persistence model that retains MongoDB but moves hot key-value data to DynamoDB to avoid connection storms during traffic surges.
Engineers built a framework using auxiliary tables and multi-item transactions to enforce unique constraints in DynamoDB, and added optimistic concurrency control and “Freshness Tokens” to ensure high write correctness and strong read-after-write guarantees for sensitive operations.
To keep the system upright under pressure, Coinbase introduced recurring load tests and a load-shedding mechanism that watches the Users service and dynamically tunes the Application Load Balancer to redirect traffic to a dummy target group during overload.
The company says the approach allows the service to “degrade gracefully rather than collapsing” and helped it “sustain over 1.5 million reads per second during market surges.”
The recap
- Coinbase explains how its Users service scales core identity workloads.
- Architecture now sustains over 1.5 million reads per second.
- Federated storage, Fragment APIs and load shedding improve resilience under spikes.
