cbETH: The trusted liquid staking token.

Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (“cbETH”) is a utility token that represents Ethereum 2 (ETH2), which is ETH staked through Coinbase. Over time, the price of cbETH will likely deviate from ETH because cbETH represents 1 staked ETH plus all of its accrued staking rewards starting from when cbETH's conversion rate and balance were initialized (June 16, 2022 19:34 UTC). cbETH is minted exclusively by Coinbase.

cbETH can be sold or sent off-platform, while ETH2 will remain locked-up until a future protocol upgrade.

We wrote a white paper for cbETH with in-depth technical details.

Wrapping your ETH2 allows you to sell or send your staked ETH before a future Ethereum network upgrade, which may happen as soon as 2023. cbETH can also be used in DeFi and other dapps.

If you want to sell your ETH2 or send it to another wallet, wrapping it for the cbETH is your only option. cbETH is an ERC-20 token and can be sold or sent anytime.

Token wrapping is a process in which a crypto asset is locked up in a smart contract and a new token (the wrapped token) is issued on the blockchain to represent the original token. 
Wrapped tokens provide liquidity, allowing customers to freely trade or transfer the position while the underlying token remains locked.

If you are in one of the geolocations where ETH staking is available, then you will be eligible to wrap your staked ETH (ETH2) into cbETH. Please view this help center article for eligible regions.

Markets may value cbETH less than staked ETH, which could cause you to lose some cash value if you wrap and then sell your cbETH. If you no longer want to hold cbETH, you can also unwrap it for ETH2 for free.
Unwrapping your cbETH will return ETH2 plus all of the rewards accrued during your holding period. The underlying ETH2 and accrued rewards remain locked after you unwrap your cbETH.

Yes, you can unwrap your cbETH and receive the underlying ETH2. The amount of ETH2 you’ll receive is equal to the amount of cbETH multiplied by the conversion rate.
The conversion rate will grow over time so long as staking rewards exceeds penalties from very rare slashing events. 

Coinbase’s cbETH token can be found at the following contract address. 

The cbETH contract address is a public address that identifies the cbETH token contract on Ethereum. The contract address can be found on the block explorer Etherscan, which is a data analytics platform that allows you to view Ethereum addresses. 

• The official cbETH contract is: 0xbe9895146f7af43049ca1c1ae358b0541ea49704

• When you visit cbETH’s address page on Etherscan, you should see the official contract address on the right side of the page. 

When receiving or buying a cbETH token off of the Coinbase platform, please confirm that the “cbETH” token corresponds to the contact address above. Anyone can mint a token with the ticker “cbETH”, so when in doubt, please confirm the contract address.

We publish the current cbETH conversion rate on an Exchange API endpoint, which represents the number of ETH2 units that can be wrapped for 1 cbETH.

ETH2 is ETH that is staked in order to validate transactions and earn rewards on the ‘Beacon Chain’, which is the new proof-of-stake blockchain that will merge with the current version of Ethereum and become the main network. The price of ETH2 is equal to ETH.
All ETH2 are currently locked in a smart contract and will not become available for trading until the merge and a following upgrade are complete. In the meantime, Coinbase is making it possible for ETH2 holders to wrap their ETH2 into cbETH, which is a liquid representation of ETH2 that can be traded or transferred.

Yes, you will. In a future Ethereum protocol upgrade, possibly as soon as 2023, the protocol will allow unstaking ETH2 back into ETH. We plan to support unstaking after this upgrade.