Coinbase Unveils Ethereum L2 Blockchain “Base”
Global cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase unveils Ethereum L2 network “Base” which is secure, affordable and developer friendly with a goal to make on-chain the next online and onboard over 1 billion users in the crypto economy.
According to the announcement, “Base makes it easy to build decentralized apps with access to Coinbase’s products, users and tools.”
To celebrate the testnet debut, interested community members can create ‘Base, Introduced’ NFTs for free until Sunday on the Zora NFT Marketplace. There were 82,804 Base NFTs minted at the time of writing.
Base was created by Coinbase to offer fast and secure access to Ethereum L1, other L2s and other L1 ecosystems such as Solana.
The base is built on the MIT-licensed OP Stack in collaboration with the layer-2 blockchain Optimism.
The cryptocurrency exchange also unveiled the Base Ecosystem Fund, which will make investments in and provide assistance to early-stage Base-based startups that meet Coinbase’s investment requirements.
Approved participants will get exclusive access to new Base features as well as direct support from the core developer and BD team members in the exclusive Base developer Discord.
A Coinbase representative said that several crypto firms, including Blockdaemon, Chainlink, Etherscan, Quicknode, Aave, Animoca Brands, Dune, Nansen, Magic Eden, etc., have committed to building on Base.
“Our focus is to ensure a successful test network. In the weeks ahead, we will share our mainnet roadmap and provide more developers with resources to build on Base,” Coinbase revealed.
Coinbase Senior Director of Engineering Jesse Pollak stated “This is a bet that we can help enable the next million dapps, which is going to bring in the next billion users. We think that’s going to happen in a five to ten years horizon, and this is our contribution to making it happen sooner rather than later. Our goal is to launch the mainnet within the next few months.”
Currently, Coinbase does not plan to issue a new network token for Base and will use Ethereum (ETH) as the original gas token.
Pollak noted “We’ve seen a lot of people using tokens to drive activity. But our thesis is that tokens aren’t the only way to drive activity. Building great products is a great way to drive activity by making things actually useful.”
According to Coinbase, it is unwaveringly committed to Base’s decentralization for years to come. The exchange is confident that Base will progress from a Stage 0 rollup to a Stage 1 rollup in 2023 and a Stage 2 rollup in 2024.
