Design-to-code and beyond: inside Coinbase’s MCP ecosystem | Schema by Figma 2025

Quick Overview

Coinbase successfully integrated its internal Coinbase Design System (CDS) with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework, creating a unified AI ecosystem that accelerates the design-to-code process by enabling AI agents to access design system context directly, leading to 5x faster development, higher code quality, better component usage, improved accessibility, and happier developers.

Key Points: Coinbase engineers approximately 2250 engineers, merging over 5000 PRs per week, serving over 100M users with over $500B in Assets Under Management (AUM). The integration of CDS with Figma via MCP standardizes how AI agents connect to design system data, providing rich context like import paths, usage examples, and prop tables. The CDS + Figma MCP integration results in a 5x faster design-to-code process, higher code quality, correct component usage, better accessibility, and happier developers. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol from Anthropic that standardizes how AI agents connect to external data sources on a case-by-case basis, becoming an industry standard. Coinbase created an internal MCP App Store allowing any team to explore, install, and build MCPs with features like one-click installation into Carson/Claude and a fully baked CI/CD system. The unified AI ecosystem powered by MCPs spans from Design to Production, connecting tools like CDS, Figma, PlayerRight, Sourcegraph, Chromatic/DocuSafe, Amplitude/DataDog, and PaperCity to ensure consistency and quality.

Context: Siddharth Kulkarni, a Senior Software Engineer at Coinbase on the AI tooling team, presents the integration of Coinbase's Design System (CDS) with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, developed initially from Anthropic's framework. This presentation details how this integration bridges the gap between design (Figma) and engineering (IDE) by providing AI tools with direct, contextual access to the design system's components and documentation, solving the context-switching problem inherent in traditional design-to-code handoffs.