A cryptocurrency exchange is a digital platform that allows users to buy, sell, and trade

cryptocurrencies.

These exchanges face unique security challenges that require specialized threat assessments and planning.

Coinbase is a U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2012 and has evolved alongside

cryptocurrency as a technology. Philip Martin is the chief security

officer at Coinbase. Prior to Coinbase, Philip built and led the incident response and security

engineering teams at Palantir and was a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent and Arabic linguist.

In this episode, Philip joins the podcast with Gregor Van to talk about his

career and security at Coinbase. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist and is the founder

and CTO of MailPass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and

general software engineering companies.

He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at

vand.hk. Hi, Philip. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

Great to be here.

Yeah, Philip, thank you so much for joining us today. You are the chief security officer

at Coinbase. So we're going to be hearing all about financial security, obviously around

cryptocurrencies. First of all, we're going to be hearing a bit more about what you did before

Coinbase. So what is kind of your path to Coinbase and how did you get into this industry at all?

Sure. Like it was way back, really. I knew I wanted to be a security practitioner when I was still in high school.

So I taught myself to code in my parents' proverbial basement. My parents don't have a basement.

Didn't have basement. But taught myself to code in high school. This was back in the 90s and started doing web design for local companies. had a good time, taught myself C, Pearl,

JavaScript, et cetera, and then ended up going to San Jose State for a bit for computer science,

...