When your platform handles billions of dollars in transactions, testing isn't optional—it's existential. That's why Coinbase's engineering team turned to Stage to transform how they test payment flows and edge cases.

The Challenge

Coinbase's payment systems integrate with dozens of external providers, each with their own quirks and failure modes. Testing these integrations was a constant struggle:

Third-party sandboxes were unreliable: Test environments would go down or behave differently than production
Edge cases were hard to reproduce: How do you test a 0.01% timeout scenario?
Incident debugging was slow: When something broke, it took hours to understand the root cause

"We'd spend more time setting up test scenarios than actually testing," says Angelo Marletta, Staff Engineer at Coinbase. "And when incidents happened, we were flying blind."

The Solution

With Stage, Coinbase's team can now:

1. Test Any Payment Scenario

By configuring mutation rules, engineers can simulate any response from their payment providers:

json

{
  "match": { "path": "/v1/payments/*" },
  "action": {
    "type": "override",
    "body": { "status": "timeout", "retry_after": 30 }
  }
}

2. Debug Production Issues Instantly

When something goes wrong, engineers can replay the exact API responses that caused the issue—without affecting real users.

3. Build Confidence in Deployments

Every PR now includes automated tests that verify behavior against staged responses, catching regressions before they reach production.

The Results

After 6 months with Stage:

73% reduction in MTTR: From an average of 45 minutes to 12 minutes
90% fewer payment-related incidents: Edge cases are caught in development
3x faster feature development: Less time debugging, more time building

Key Takeaways

Gateway-level testing is a game changer: Testing at the HTTP layer catches issues that unit tests miss
Staging scenarios should be version-controlled: Treat your test scenarios like code
Incident response improves with better tooling: When you can reproduce any scenario, debugging becomes straightforward

Want to learn how Stage can help your team? Get in touch or start your free trial.

How Coinbase Reduced MTTR by 73% with Stage