Is Coinbase's Base the key to the next billion users in the crypto?
Coinbase launches Base, a developer-friendly layer-2 blockchain built on Optimism Stack and announces collaborations with major crypto businesses and other chains.
Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, has yesterday announced the launch of Base, a layer-2 (L2) blockchain that is designed to help developers build decentralized applications (dApps) on-chain.
The new blockchain is Ethereum-based with the main focus on being developer-friendly, low-cost, and secure. With this move, Coinbase is expanding its focus beyond trading and exchange, and is keen on bringing a billion users into the crypto economy.
0/ 🔵 Hello world.
— Base (@BuildOnBase) February 23, 2023
Meet Base, an Ethereum L2 that offers a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build decentralized apps.
Our goal with Base is to make onchain the next online and onboard 1B+ users into the cryptoeconomy.https://t.co/Znuu3o3pJw
Built on Optimism Stack
The latest L2 blockchain is being built on the MIT-licensed OP Stack in collaboration with the layer-2 blockchain Optimism, which is also focused on the Ethereum chain.
Base is being designed as a secure, low-cost, and developer-friendly chain that aims to help builders create dApps on-chain. It will have comparable fees to Arbitrum or Optimism in the 10- to 50-cent range initially, with plans to drop to near 1 cent over the next year.
The information about using Optimism stack has resulted in a surge of tokens from Optimism's ecosystem, with SONNE, the native token of Sonne Finance jumping 82% and the governance and utility token OPX skyrocketing by 144%. Perpetual Protocol's PERP token has also seen a 42% rise in its market value, while Optimism's OP token has jumped over 10%. VELO, the native token of the decentralized exchange Velodrome Finance, gaining 21% in the past 24 hours.
Decentralized Future
While Base is currently being incubated inside Coinbase, the plan is to decentralize it in the years ahead. The team has done a lot of work over the last six months to address some of the biggest concerns from others, including how a big centralized company can engage in a decentralized way.
Coinbase's goal with Base is to provide the foundation for developers and users to enable folks coming in, which will require making Base as cheap, secure, and decentralized as possible because that decentralization is a key aspect to enable the openness of the ecosystem.
Integrations & Collaborations
Coinbase has already received commitments from various crypto businesses, platforms, marketplaces, and infrastructure firms to build on Base. These include Blockdaemon, Chainlink, Etherscan, Quicknode, Aave, Animoca Brands, Dune, Magic Eden, Rainbow Wallet, Ribbon Finance, The Graph, and Gelato.
Besides that, Base will be integrated across Coinbase's exchange, wallet, NFT marketplace, and developer products, and plans to be interoperable with other blockchains in the ecosystem beyond Ethereum.
Base has had conversations with teams building Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and others to work on that vision. In addition, Base is launching an ecosystem fund in partnership with Coinbase Ventures to make mainly pre-seed investments in builders developing on Base across the crypto ecosystem.
Is Coinbase Planing a Native token?
Right after the launch of Base, Coinbase has clarified that its new L2 blockchain, will not have its own native token. Instead, the network will use Ethereum's native token, ETH, as its gas token. This means that transactions on the network will require the use of ETH to pay the transaction fees.
When mainnet?
Coinbase has mentioned that they are working to address the issues encountered during the testnet launch and are focused on improving Base's functionality, security, and scalability. They are also actively seeking feedback from the community to inform the development of Base and ensure that it meets the needs of users.
As of now, there is no official announcement from Coinbase about the exact launch date for Base's mainnet. However, we can expect the blockchain to launch within the Q2 of 2023, once all the issues are resolved, and the product is deemed stable.
When CoinBrain Support?
We're ready to add support for this new promissinf L2 chain as soon as the mainnet launch. Please, stay tuned!
