Travel Rule

Company:

Coinbase

Role:

Associate Engineer, Compliance Technology

Project description:

Context: At Coinbase, ensuring compliance with international financial regulations is paramount. Travel Rule regulations mandate that for certain transactions, additional information be collected and shared with the recipient financial institution. Regulatory changes in two additional countries meant that transactions from users in these jurisdictions fell under the Travel Rule, presenting a compliance and technical challenge.

Solution: We adjusted our code to accurately encompass transactions subject to the new regulations.

Technology:

Golang, Test Driven Development (TDD)

Responsibilities and Achievements:

• Became proficient enough in Golang within the project timeframe to navigate and contribute to the existing complex codebase effectively.

• Successfully expanded the system's logic to identify and process transactions falling under the new Travel Rule regulations, ensuring full compliance without service interruption.

• Crafted comprehensive new tests before pushing updates to guarantee robustness and maintainability.

• Adjusted and expanded existing tests to align with the updated logic.

Challenges:

One significant challenge encountered during this project was the sheer volume of the test suite which spans thousands of lines of code. The new code broke unrelated existing tests and it was difficult to pinpoint the cause of the failing tests. This highlighted the importance of refactoring code as it grows, and the tradeoffs of a TDD approach. Breaking the test file into smaller, more manageable modules or files, each focused on specific functionalities or components of the system will ultimately save time by making future debugging easier.